Perspectivism is the art of cheerfully breaking your own heart, so that you may feed your spirit.
aphoristic, this one.
OK faust, tell me how I did.
So you turn to philosophy to find thruth. You read, observe, think… everything you do is in the name of thruth. I’ll find thruth. After a while, shifting from thruth to thruth, you come to realise that the things you believed in are just a matter of perspective. You convince yourself that you shouldn’t take it all to serious, cause it are your believes only after all. What are they compared to the millions of other points of view. You laugh at yourself for taking it all so seriously as you once did. You set on the task to evaluate all values and invest in other’s point of view to learn, to investigate, how do they life, how is life lived best… you widen you scope and come to understand a lot. This is quite a nice feeling actually, much like a drug, look at all these people trapped in their perspective! What a God’s view I have. But it starts to dawn on you that these people are, happier, more alive,… they view things from a first-person view and you come to understand that this is probably how humans are meant to exist. You realise that thruth, knowledge, a wider scope of view isn’t that important. But unfortunatly you have lost the art of deceiving youself. Or better, you know you are stilll deceiving yourself, but not in a way that is convincing to you. Your point of view is lost to you. Life is not about knowing about life, life is about living… go figure.
(my English sucks and I’m drunk, I tried 
)
Sandy - you never fail to get to the heart of the matter.
Truth is, I was just on my way out to work. There was more.
Really, there was.
If I could only remember it.
Ego - a couple of things about truth. First, you have to learn to spell it correctly.
Well, that may be all I know about truth, to tell you the truth.
Basically correct, though - it’s not that you lose the ability to deceive yourself - it’s that you come to accept that you have no choice but to deceive yourself. You must take your self-deceit seriously, but not somberly.
And yeah, you have to get past that Godlike feeling - it’s the ones who don’t who become Nietzsche-Nazis. Some of it is just testosterone poisoning.
I’m not sure that nonperspectivists are necessarily happier - but they can often be more content - yes.
I have posted aphorisms before - usually I just get a collective blank stare. While that may be in part because the aphorism isn’t very good, it’s also because people don’t know how to read aphorisms. Or don’t enjoy them.
I hope you enjoyed mine, Ego. I have played to a drunk audience more than once before.
Stop it you just broke my heart. 
Aw, Satyr, you forgot the “cheer” part. It’s supposed to be cheery.
Damn.
Yeah, missed that cheerful part too, but I think I’m getting better at it.
Thanks Faust
I’ve been having a bit of issues with perspective. I thought that if one see’s so many perspectives and understands these things by seeing the joyous part of them, how does one know what to pick from such a big list. I’ve been chasing personality, but it feels like a wild goose chase, and more so feels like the goose isn’t even there. This helped me a bit i got to say. I think i’ve only been focusing on the personality because one cannot tell other’s of perspectives because imagination is lacking in many. After going through a acouple people one starts to think that what they are seeing isn’t there, so aiming to get the personality would make life easier as one goes to drugs i guess you could say. Maybe if i focus more so on benifits of this uhh…enlightenment? i can get a mindless personality
Assume personality. Or, better, try to avoid it and see how far you get.
I took a philosophy class called The Philosophy of Hapiness, or something like that. One of the topics was about “finding yourself”. This incensed me. I remember just plain exploding in class one day. How do you avoid yourself? Much as we may try? And some peple try real hard.
Anyway, I am very pleased I could be of help.
Reality is seen as a powerful, influencial, supriem force, by many persons. And above that, the supernatural, super-real.
When little man says his feelings are true, or feels his ideas are true, he may also relate to that power of being “real”. That feeling, like hope and like faith, is appealing. So, it is inspiring, it affirms man’s constructs, and it becomes oh-so-metaphysical.
Only a certain kind of heart would ever break, an unflexable heart which could not really bend in so far. One that was like glass, or like knots on a short cord, not like water or like something even more abstract and un-quantifyable. Would not that be a great sin, to be un-knowable? It would not even be like water, and it could not be trapped or controlled by specific thoughts.
An unbreakable heart, by religion, is an unvaluable heart. It cannot be sacrificed or restrained, it cannot be measured or quantified, and so it cannot have value or class. But man -is- religion. Man is breaking himself and sacrificing himself constantly. Man has made much pain for himself, and also much morality, much value. Man uses strange power.
I was just browsing ‘perspectivism’ on Wikipedia and I was struck by this quote:
“It should be noted that some thinkers, such as José Ortega y Gasset, conceived of a potential sum of all perspectives of all lives which could produce an “absolute truth”.”
I’m curious what you think of that. It strikes me as against the entire direction and spirit of perspectivism. I also wonder if Kierkegaard’s vehement opposition to Hegelian dialectics comes from a very similar conceptual conflict.
What I like about the perspectivist approach as I understand it at the moment is its honesty, its ability to look at an entire situation, and its impulse to look to dependent causes rather than accepting some person’s, culture’s, or religion’s will to power as ultimate truth. My critique of perspectivism as I currently understand it is in fact that it doesn’t go far enough. If it’s insights are used as an empowering subjective and individual will to power then perhaps its basic gist has been subverted.
There was a famous Finnish architect who was part of the early rationalist movement of the 20th century. He naturally broke away from that movement, not through rejecting it, but through his claims that rationalism wasn’t in fact rational enough - it didn’t penetrate deeply enough. I’m kind of thinking the same thing here about perspectivism and how it may be utilized by people, validly or otherwise.
Anyway, to get back to how I started here, I wonder if you think the idea of ‘absolute truth’ is anathema to perspectivism. Doesn’t perspectivism inevitably lead to the Buddhist concept of emptiness (shunyata)?
I realize these thoughts might not relate to your own perspective on perspectivism. But what can I do?
I have never read anything of Ortega y Gasset’s that I thought was remotely interesting. If there can be such a thing as a “rationalist persepctivist”, he is that.
I’m not sure what you mean about Kierkegaard and Hegel, though, as they were not in the same camp to begin with. You know, they both belived in a god that wasn’t so much like a god, but other than that? K was an existential psychologist when it was hip to be so. Hegel was a politically hip Aquinas - a lackey for the crown if not the cloth.
I dunno.
"If it’s insights are used as an empowering subjective and individual will to power then perhaps its basic gist has been subverted. "
I do not understand this sentence (in a “reading comprehension” way).
Psychological truth is persepctivist truth. That can remain a vague conception for the moment, I think. Almost any way you want to define that term would probably work. Id “absolute truth” can be subverted somehow to psychological truth, then okey-dokey.
I’m not saying Gasset didn’t do that - I just don’t see any purpose in doing so, for a persepctivist.
My impression of Kierkegaard’s dispute with Hegel is that Hegel’s dialectical method was a ‘building’ process, with consensus as it’s aim. I admit I could be completely misunderstanding Hegel (I’ve never read him). Kierkegaard’s interest in subjectively experienced existential truths was in the opposite direction to my mind - having more to do with shedding concepts imposed from outside the individual.
That’s because I didn’t write it well. It seems to me that perspectivism has often been used to validate the will to power in individuals and groups, resulting in philosophies of aggression. This strikes me as opposite to the basic insights that create the perspectivist philosophy in the first place (critique of power). I’m curious about your thoughts on that.
I’m interested in what you mean by ‘psychological truth’. My own psychology for example is a mess. Is truth the mess itself? Or the elements of the mess before I judge it to be a mess? Etc. I’m just trying to get under the words a bit to try and learn where you are coming from.
Well, I’m not sure how much more agressive philosophy can be than real life is. Philosophers all dream of changing the world, and a few have - that’s pretty agressive, I guess. What Plato alone has done to all of us is a shame, really.
By “psychological truth” I mean that insanity can be defined as a rejection of the lies we must tell ourselves in order to thrive.
change the world… maybe
categorize the world… more likely
shape the world… not even nietzsche could do as he wished…
-Imp
NOT to get all Kantian on you, but what is the difference?
Okay, if that’s Kantian, tell me…as a friend…as if I had some spaghetti sauce on my nose or something.
the same difference as the coal and the diamond…
-Imp
I think your use of the word ‘aggressive’ in this context seems too broadly applied to me. It’s like saying that democracy is just as aggressive as totalitarianism. It is an excellent insight to see aggression in democracy, but is everything really just as aggressive as anything else? Likewise, freedom must be protected. Without protection there is no freedom, as any person in a ‘purely’ free society is a potential totalitarian ruler, able to inflict power as he or she sees fit due to their own ‘psychological truth’.
Your definition of psychological truth is a very compelling one for me. But what also interests me is our certainty regarding what is a truth and what is a lie. Don’t we define truth and lies based on our perspective?
Yes, anon, we do. Certainty is a psychological state, not an epistemic one.
If we can generally agree that a billion+ people all have perspectives, and at the same time they all have very VERY limited knowledge and experience compared to how large and ancient this universe is, then one perspective, a perspective, a thought itself, a sense, an idea or a belief, is generally a very tiny speck of a fraction of it all. A sense, a thought, it is a reflection, like light on a mirror. It requires some kind of experience, something social, a reaction between two forces. So we may be able to say, that a perspective is just a tiny speck of the whole process of interacting force. A form of reflective, multifarious energy, is a perspective.