HUMANS
IN THE WORLD: INTRODUCTION
TO RADICAL PERSPECTIVISM
HUMANS
IN THE WORLD: INTRODUCTION
TO RADICAL PERSPECTIVISM
Other Chapters:
Alexander Makedon
Chicago State University
Copyright © 1992
CULTURE Posted 1/6/01
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A perspectivist culture encompasses a diversity of both human, and imaginable non-human perspectives. At its core it is no less than the whole world manifested individually through a world-identifiable psychology (=individuals identifying with imaginable perspectives of other world parts). An individual growing up in perspectivist culture will not find it strange or exotic that people in such culture use their thinking abilities to represent not just humans, but the whole world; that they would rather have just enough to meet their basic needs, so to allow the maximum possible benefit to other world parts that must also share the same world, instead of greedily hoarding natural wealth just for human use; or that legal, industrial, or other institutions are built within and around nature in a synergetic cohabitation in which humans actively seek to benefit not just themselves, but the whole world. Socially, perspectivist culture would include a daily awareness, dissemination of, and support for issues and concerns similar to those within multicultural, democratic, environmental and animal rights movements.
Because of prevailing attitudes toward the world in a perspectival culture, one might expect that high culture and the arts might be re-defined in less selfishly human-centered ways. Perspectival art does not put humans on a high pedestal of human-attributable achievement, but more humbly becomes universally aware, and therefore representative, of a world that "arts" though humans. The human capacity to engage in art is rightfully attributed also to a world in whose context humans evolved, and therefore is no less "artful." Human art becomes more animal and non-human symbolic "world art" of the sort we often see in naturalistic cultures (=cultures in greater harmony with nature), such as, native American, or ancient Greek and other cultures. Such cultures openly acknowledge nature for its own sake (as opposed to merely as a stepping stone for human glorification). In fact the concept of "hubris," or godly insult, in ancient Greek culture is closely tied to the insolent behavior of some humans who egotistically attribute their achievements just to themselves, instead of more broadly to all those forces in nature, represented in Greek religion by a variety of gods, that made their achievements altogether possible.
A perspectivist culture is built on the basis of a legal system that protects radically perspectivist attitudes and lifestyles, such as, through the passing of a Bill of Perspectival Rights. Finally, a perspectivist culture conveys its philosophy from generation to generation through the design of educational institutions that train people how to co-exist with other world parts in a non-selfish harmony. In such harmony, humans are not set apart from, or against nature, but learn how to use their abilities to both survive themselves, and help other world parts also survive.
Perspectivist culture is a microcosm of the universe. In such a culture, no revolution is revolutionary enough to destroy the harmony that connects all of its interconnected parts. What is considered intellectually "revolutionary" in a culture where a certain set of non-universal first assumptions are dominant (see chapter on universal first assumptions), is a matter of daily routine in a culture where a radically diverse set of assumptions is constantly given the opportunity, in fact encouraged, to be represented. This is so because under radical perspectivism there is no "truth," other than our universal, and therefore from a modern perspective, "revolutionary," re-interpretations.
It seems that at least in the west, as we became more self-aware of our ability to think, from the pre-Socratics on down, we became so engrossed with our discovery that we considered it more important that we think about our ability to think, than to use it to represent the world. Witness the development of theories of language, thinking, and knowledge, or until recently the preponderance of linguistic or "analytic" philosophy in North America. Although our thinking is part of the world we would like to understand, it is only as we begin to use it to represent the whole world, rediscover its possibilities, or reinterpret it from its own numerous imaginable perspectives, that we will not only be smart, in the sense of having highly developed thinking skills, but wise. Our culture will then be re-built on a more universal basis.
If some cultures seem "primitive" to us in the west, or at least did so until the rise of multiculturalism, it may be because we have so defined "culture" as to protect our method of inquiry from non-western methods. In fact, the very use of the term "primitive" may be a way of blocking from our minds even the possibility that "primitive cultures" may know something that we don't, or forgot how to go about learning. On closer examination, we may find that such cultures learn more about the world through role-play, for example, in their rituals or dances, while in the west we often encounter the world mainly through a detached distance. For some of us in the west our phenomenology may be too human to include the world; while for some of non-western cultures, their world may be too magical to realize that they can have their own human perspective.
We have allowed in the west our long standing concern with doing right to throw our playfulness out of balance by asking ourselves what is right, which is usually limited only to humans (such as, any number of human relationship types), instead of within the broader natural context in which humans find themselves. On the other hand, certain so called "primitive" cultures may lack the critical "distance" that comes from a long tradition of critical thinking and questioning (as in the west) to realize more fully that what they are doing when they mimic nature are self-chosen acts of human volition and understanding, instead of pre-ordained religiously or socially "inevitable" events. They may have been raised to believe this is how things are, as if they are mere observers in a static order that now puts humans at the non-self-aware margin of ritualistic repetition.
In both western criticism of nature, and primitive ritualism, there is a common dualism of humans either separated from nature, or giving up their humanness as freely thinking beings to accept it. Instead of these two extreme varieties of almost total rejection, or total acceptance of nature, radical perspectivism embraces and reconciles both the human capacity for criticism and freedom (developed mainly in the west), and respect for and representation of nature (practiced mainly in non-western and other societies). Under radical perspectivism, humans represent nature not because they are cowed into obedience to a naturalistic status quo, or because they are indoctrinated to believe this is the only way they can live their lives, but as a result of a fully self aware and critically-generated choice to do so (knowing also that they don't have to). They are educated to become fully self-aware critical thinkers who represent nature not because they don't think they can change or question it, but precisely because they realize fully how capable they are of representing it, and, more importantly, how ethical or "right" it seems that they should do so (see chapter on Ethics).
In the west, the philosophical tradition reaching back at least to Socrates, and hence also the Socratic method of questioning reality, has made westerners in general more skeptical and doubtful of any given or taught reality.
Our "logocentrism" in the west, to borrow from Jacques Derrida's lexicon, may be seen as no less magical, than the belief in the magical power of words, rituals, or symbols by so-called "primitive" peoples. Ironically, it was precisely this magic which humans attempted to escape from through the development of logic or reason, including more recently the development of scientific reason. In the end our over-reliance on our ability to think may have led us to a magical world of metaphysical constructs. Perhaps it is for this reason that empiricists, pragmatists, and positivists have been waging war against metaphysics ever since the renaissance: having sensed the epistemological importance of experiencing the world "first hand," they reacted against over-intellectualizing it out of existence. Yet even they suggested no better plan for understanding the world than merely to redirect the human capacity to think, as contrasted to worlding our thinking. Thus instead of letting the world enter us, as in role-play, we use our thinking to manipulate the world according to human-centered presuppositions.
As a result of our modern enthusiasm for analysis in the west, we frequently enter our worldly observations pre-occupied with our own plan of how the world should be. This is an old observation about the human condition, most recently made even more apparent by the rise of such schools of thought as Marxism, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism, each of which places its own brand of ideological explosives near the center of our comfortable beliefs. If certain so called "primitive" peoples believe in spirits, magic, or reincarnation, all of which we have long discarded in the west, our own predisposition toward seeing everything critically from a distance may have led us to another kind of magic. This is the magic of our self-fulfilling cosmological prophecies. By building a pre-designed plan, paradigm, or method with which to analyze the world, which in recent times is commonly known as "scientific," we are in effect placing more importance on our own plans, than on the world itself, thus expecting "like magic" our plans to come true (see chapter on Science).
Humans are now realizing they can't change the world through the magic of their reason alone, but must learn to live "un-reasonably" through nature, but without abandoning their ability to reason. For example, while our utopian business plans may have led us to polluting the environment, and thus living within our own miserable trap, in the future we can use our ability to reason to live harmoniously with other world-parts. This represents a perspectivistic culture in which humans constantly think of how their institutions will effect the "lives" of other human and non-human world parts.
As humans shed their a priori thinking postulates in favor of perspectivistic thinking, they return to nature wiser, freer, and more fully actualized. In this process of mutual benefit and borrowing (of reason by other world parts which humans role play; and world by humans which other world parts collectively make possible), humans are no longer captives of their thinking skills, nor unthinkingly immersed inside a mechanical ritual, but a thinking world part that constantly worlds its thinking.
Our culture in the west became a "fortress" culture that sees nature as a hostile, threatening, or dangerous place. We built "unnatural" defense mechanisms to protect ourselves from nature. People living "naturally," as were many peoples encountered by colonial powers during the 15th through 19th centuries AD, were seen as part of an alien natural world, and therefore just as alien or "threatening." They were "savages" that western imperialists attempted to subdue, change (for example Christianize), or eliminate. Instead of seeing nature as the Mother that gave us life, and in the midst of which we could find happiness, we "packaged" it outside our human identity. We postulated, instead, an unnatural God Who is outside nature, as is, for example, the Christian God, and occasionally even opposed to it. Instead of balancing our fear of death against the recurring cycle of our natural existence, we replaced nature with a supernatural world occupied by unnatural souls and saints.
It is perhaps telling about our modern human beliefs that many space-adventure films and video games, such as, Star Wars, and most of the space games that one can see in a video arcade, would depict the universe as a dangerous place, populated by man-hating enemies and warmongering galactic dynasties. There is probably no better example of human atomic first assumptions about the universe overshadowing a universal perspective, than the imaginary universe that these films promote. Perhaps a relic of an earlier time when humans were more "fighter" than human, our modern reaction toward the universe may be an indication that our subconsious feelings toward an unknown world have still to catch up with our conscious understanding of universal possibilities. By drawing a seemingly insurmountable dividing line between ourselves and the universe, we block the expansion of our sense of self or ego to become coextensive with the world as a whole. Instead of seeing the world as a partner in the cosmic dance of universal possibilities, we persist in seeing it through the lens of our popular culture as separate, hostile, and threatening.
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