Perspectivism
 | This article may be confusing or unclear to readers. (April 2007) |
Perspectivism is the philosophical view developed by Friedrich Nietzsche that all ideations take place from a particular cognitive perspective. That is, individual concepts of existence are defined by the circumstances surrounding that individual. Perspectivism as a philosophy is outlined by the 1876 fragment of Nietzsche's work entitled “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)'
The basic idea of perspectivism is that there are many possible conceptual schemes, or perspectives (which are adopted by default, whether we are aware or not) which determine any possible judgment of truth or value that we may make; this implies that no way of seeing the world is more correct than its rivals. This is sometimes contrasted with objectivism, which contends that perception (i.e., sensory information/awareness) can be translated into valid concepts that accurately identify the objective facts of reality; perspectivism, for all intents and purposes, would preclude this process, or view this process of translation as impossible. 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".
On the other side of the spectrum, it also 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. That is, relativism as such negates there are any objective evaluations which transcend cultural formations or subjective designations by reference to, for instance, some particular moralities which may then be either justified or assessed.
Perspectivism, in this way, is the delineation of vantage points as formal constituents within networks or systems of perspectival schemata. It moreover emphatically assesses rules (i.e., those of philosophy, the scientific method, etc.) according to contingent circumstances of those contextual perspectives (to which Schacht refers as perspectivism's “D-relativity”[1]). “Truth” is thus formalized as a whole that is directly related to the integration of vantage points within these schemata; this eliminates the incumbent contrast between absolutism and relativism and thus expands the framework to a scale of validity or falsity in relation to a contextual grounding that is irreducible.
Further, 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.[2]