I was gonna write another essay on parasitism, not because I had a whole lot to say about that after the previous essay, except that reading Michel Serres’ ‘Parasite’ also gave me some heavy Baruch Spinoza vibes. I guess that’s worth it’s own essay, but, well, we’ll see if I ever get around to write something on that. Maybe. Maybe not.
Right, so, why another essay about that was something that I was gonna do? Well, your’s truly somehow, just like somehow, managed to get another parasite this month. Fun times, once again. Okay, seriously, this was super chill compared to the last one, which was like something from another planet. A couple of days and it was fine, no problem, but, well, I miss some stuff because of that, as a precaution, so there’s that.
But if I’m not going to deal with parasitism again this time, what’s the deal then? Well, how about some perspectivism? Or how about some hyperreality? I’ve covered these in the past, but more like in passing, in reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s work and Jean Baudrillard’s work, so, I guess it would make sense try to do something with these concepts. I’ll cover Nietzsche this time and, perhaps, Baudrillard another time. We’ll see.
So, perspectivism? What’s the deal? Well, without looking up anything, working solely on my memory, it’s all about one’s perspective, the one you happen to have, here and now or, well, any given moment in your life. That means that no matter what, no matter what happens, your view, that perspective, is never impartial, like full or complete, and thus any kind of appeal to objectivity is just, well, at best, naïve or, at worst, stupid, like really, really idiotic.
But that’s just me, working from memory, so it’s better to consult some sources. What does something as reputable as the Oxford English Dictionary have to say about this? So, let’s see the entry for perspectivism (OED, s.v. “perspectivism”, n.):
“[T]he theory that knowledge of a subject is inevitably partial and limited by the individual perspective from which it is viewed, or that objectivity is impossible.”
This is also clearly attributed to Nietzsche, with the first ever entry being in reference to one of his works or, rather, to one of the translations of his works. Anyway, the dictionary has a bit more to say about this (OED, s.v. “perspectivism”, n.):
“Also … the partiality and limitation inherent in knowledge according to this theory.”
I think these are pretty good definitions of perspectivism. Okay, they are not the only definitions out there, fair enough, but still, I think these two offer us a good summary. The main thing here is that there is no such thing as impartiality. That also means that while can talk about the objective world, like how the world really is, fair enough, there’s no objectivity, at least not in the sense that would be accessible to us or that we could somehow put together by combining a number of perspectives. This is not to say that understanding the world from other perspectives is not useful, no, that’s not it, because that’s highly useful, but rather that you can never reach any kind of completion that way.
But, what did the man himself have to say about perspectivism? In ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ he (87) notes, right after referring in passing to Immanuel Kant’s views of intelligible things, which I take to be the things-in-themselves, that:
“[L]et us be more wary of the dangerous old conceptual fairy-tale which has set up a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless, subject of knowledge’, let us be wary of the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge as such’[.]”
In other words, there is no one, absolutely no one whose perspective is disinterested. To think otherwise is, in his (87) view or, should I say, perspective, is simply absurd:
“[W]e are asked to think an eye which cannot be thought at all, an eye turned in no direction at all, an eye where the active and interpretative powers are to be suppressed, absent, but through which seeing still becomes a seeing-something, so it is an absurdity and non-concept of eye that is demanded.”
Indeed, what is an all-seeing eye? What is an eye that has nothing else attached to it? Can such an eye even see? If it can see, what’s the point of such seeing? I don’t know, nor does he, hence the absurdity of it. Anyway, he (87) still has more to say about this:
“There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’.”
What’s particularly noteworthy here is that he isn’t saying that there’s isn’t objectivity, but rather that it is poorly defined, as it results in absurdity. So, as I pointed out, based solely on my memory, and on my understanding of this matter, it’s highly beneficial to see the world from different perspectives. That’s what he means by having more eyes. That said, it’s not simply more eyes, those of the same perspective, because that’s just more eyes, not more perspectives. That’s why you want various eyes, not just eyes in general. This way we get more complete understanding of something (that should really be italicized in that bit, but whatever). That does not, however, mean that we’ll ever get a compete understanding of something, just a more complete understanding of it, as he clearly points out there and he (87) goes on to emphasize:
“But to eliminate the will completely and turn off all the emotions without exception, assuming we could: well? would that not mean to castrate the intellect?”
So, in summary, what we think of as objectivity is not only out of reach, like it is for Kant, but also incomprehensible, unlike it is for Kant. At the same time, subjectivity, like it being just about you and your opinion, is equally absurd for him, as it is for me. It’s like who’s me, the ‘I’, anyway? He (267) addresses this is ‘The Will to Power’, first by addressing the problem with objectivity:
“Against positivism, which halts at phenomena—’There are only facts’—I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact ‘in itself’.”
Note here how he mentions that there’s no such thing as things-in-themselves, not even in the sense that Kant thinks of them as these, well, what we cannot truly know, but still there. Nietzsche (267) continues, now addressing the problem with subjectivity:
“‘Everything is subjective,’ you say; but even this is interpretation. The ‘subject’ is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is.”
This may tempt you to interrupt him, to point that, ha, but if there’s no subject and thus no subjectivity, then who’s doing the interpretation, like wouldn’t that mean that there’s then a subject and thus subjectivity? Ha! Well, no. Just no, as he (267) goes on to add:
“[I]s it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis.”
Why would that be? Well, because it doesn’t really make any difference what you call it, subject or interpreter, it’s all the same. What about knowledge then? Well, he (267) has that covered as well:
“In so far as the word ‘knowledge’ has any meaning, the world is knowable[.]”
Yeah, I agree. We are in the habit of speaking about knowledge, like all the time, especially in the academics. It’s, however, also something that we say in everyday life, like, all the time. I know, I know, I say I know, I know, like all the time, but do I really know? And if I really know, what is it that I really know? I don’t know, it’s just something that I say in recognition of something, like as a concession, acknowledging that it’s only likely that I actually don’t know. Anyway, this gets me to his (267) next point:
“[B]ut it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings.—’Perspectivism.’”
So, yeah, to repeat an earlier point, knowledge is therefore rather something that we’ve created by taking into account many, many perspectives. Is it perfect? No, because it can’t be perfect, because it cannot be perfected. We can look at something, from many, many perspectives, but never from all perspectives. That’s’ the point about there being countless meanings, because there are countless perspectives.
In other words, there are infinite interpretations. But does that mean that all interpretations are thus equally valid? In a sense, yes, but, in another sense, no. In general, yes, as we cannot know for sure. In practice, no, as the perspectives are not tied to the subject, as already pointed out. By this I mean that there are always finite number of interpretations at any given moment, but, beyond that moment, the number of interpretations is not bounded. To be clear, if there were no bounds, anything would go and nothing would make sense, but that’s clearly not the case.
I think Valentin Vološinov explains this well in his ‘Marxism and the Philosophy of Language’ when he (87) contrasts two ways of thinking about experience or, rather, how one experiences something on the basis of prior experience. Firstly, there’s the I-experience. Secondly, there’s the we-experience. For him (88), the former can be achieved only at the expense of sense, by which he means that one can only have a truly individual experience inasmuch it is a physiological response. For example, if you scream in pain, wailing in agony, that’s your individual experience. The latter he (88) considers to be the way we experience the world. We experience the world as members of various groups of people, that is to say in relation to other people, as he (88) goes on to specify. To tie this with Nietzsche’s view, this means that our perspectives are based on the perspectives of other people. To be clear, this does not mean that we experience the world just like everyone else, like clones, as Vološinov (88) points out. Our perspectives are, in a sense, unique and individual, but not because we are born that way. It’s rather that we become unique and individual, what he (88) prefers to call differentiated, through our interaction with other people as members of various groups of people, that is to say through differentiation. So, paradoxically, the more you deal with people and the more people there are for you to deal with, the more differentiated you are likely going to become and vice versa, as he (88) goes on to explain:
“The stronger, the more organized, the more differentiated the collective in which an individual orients himself, the more vivid and complex his inner world will be.”
I know I’ve explained this before, like a couple of times already, using the same example, so I won’t get tangled up with this for much longer, but, in summary, he (88-89) asks us to think of something like how people deal with hunger, principally in two polar opposite ways. Of course, there are ways of dealing with just about anything, as acknowledged by him (88), but that’s not the point here. So, on one hand, you have people who aren’t well organized. For them, hunger is just something that you have to deal with. It’s all about food. Their experience is therefore virtually the same, even though they may not even be aware of each other’s existence. On the other hand, you have people who are well organized. They experience hunger not only as a concrete thing, as a shortage of food, but as a social issue and seek to address the issue. Now, this alone does explain how experience is differentiated as it’s just one instance, but it starts to make sense if you think of yourself as a member of various different groups, so not only as, let’s say, a peasant or a factory worker, to use his (88-89) example, and take into account that this also applies to other people. It’s also important to acknowledge that not everyone is part of the same groups of people, what he (88-89) calls collectives. This is what I meant with how experience is marked by the relations we have with other people. They influence us and we influence them, but as not everyone influences everyone, it’s all bound to be differentiated.
He (89) also warns us to flatter ourselves. It is rare that to have those I-experiences, as already pointed out, but that’s not really what he takes issue with in this context. For him (89), there’s a certain kind of self-contradictory we-experience that fools us think that we are unique individuals from the get-go, what he calls individualistic self-experience. It’s marked by confidence and a sense of autonomy, which, nonetheless, the person owes to other people, as he (89) points out:
“The individualistic type of experience derives from a steadfast and confident social orientation, Individualistic confidence in oneself, one’s sense of personal value, is drawn not from within, not from the depths of one’s personality but from the outside world.”
This is exactly how it is self-contradictory. We like to think that there’s the ‘I’, the self, fully autonomous and unique, one of a kind from the start, but, ironically, we owe all that to other people as it is through our interaction with other people we become conscious of, well, just about anything in the first place. That’s what he mean’s when he (88) likens the I-experience with animals and the we-experience with humans. As a sidenote, I don’t think that would hold anymore, as such, because that makes it seem like animals don’t experience the world as members of a group, as a collective, which I believe they do, but we just don’t understand them or, well, our understanding of how all that works is rather limited. Anyway, he (89) expands on that contradiction:
“It is the … interpretation of one’s social recognizance and tenability by rights, and of the objective security and tenability provided by the whole social order, of one’s individual Iivelihood.”
So, in short, it’s the outside that explains the inside and not the other way around. It’s pretty simple really. You owe your existence to others, materially speaking, and your understanding of the world, your consciousness of it, to others as well, semiotically speaking. You are the offspring in both senses, as is everyone else. So, yeah, don’t flatter yourself, as he (90) goes on to reiterate:
“Thus the personality of the speaker, taken from within, so to speak, turns out to be wholly a product of social interrelations.”
This means that your personality, that is to say what makes you interesting, is not something that you can take credit for. Instead, it’s something that you must give others credit for. He (90) continues:
“Not only its outward expression but also its inner experience are social territory. Consequently, the whole route between inner experience (the ‘expressible’) and its outward objectification (the ‘[expression]’) lies entirely across social territory.”
I think this is a particularly neat passage as here he points out that what we think, on our own, the expressible, and what we express in ways that others can become aware of it, the expression, is not attributable to the ‘I’, the self or the subject. Okay, I guess we can still speak of the ‘I’, the self and the subject, but they then longer understood the same way. Each individual, me, you, anyone, is then only explainable in reference to other individuals, as he (90) goes on to add:
“When an experience reaches the stage of actualization in a full-fledged utterance, its social orientation acquires added complexity by focusing on the immediate social circumstances of discourse and, above all, upon actual addressees.”
In other words, no matter what we say or what we do (or just do, if we think of saying as doing), it only makes sense inasmuch we account for discourse, which in turn only makes sense inasmuch we account for other people. This is also why I’m all about pragmatics and discourse analysis and, well, couldn’t really care less for what most linguists have focused on and many still focus on. To me, language just doesn’t make any sense without people, in the objective sense, as having some existence separate from people, or in the subjective sense, as attributable to the subject, as this thing that allows us to make sense of what else is there, these objects.
He expands on this issue also in another book, ‘Freudianism: A Marxist Critique’, when he addresses how this is handle in psychology (of his time, of course). He (18-22) starts by noting that there are two camps: the objective camp and the subjective camp. In summary, both insist on the exact opposite. The former builds on external observation, whereas the latter relies on internal observation, aka introspection. At a glance, it would seem like relying on introspection just doesn’t cut it, simply because we have no access to that inner experience, that expressible, so we must judge everything solely on observation, that is to say on the expressions. He (22) even explicitly gives the former credit for this, for pointing that it is not what explains, but what must be explained. That said, just as we can’t trust other people’s accounts of their introspection, as there’s no way we can be sure that the expression is the same as the expressible, as people do lie, like all the time, we can’t trust the observer either, because that also applies to the observer. There’s no guarantee that what the observer goes on to express, for others to apprehend, is the same as the expressible, what the observer thinks. To be clear, this does not mean that we somehow fail at that, because we don’t, because we do experience the world the same way, as our covert, inner speech is exactly like our overt, outwardly expressed outer speech. It’s rather that, firstly, we can’t be sure of whether people say what they think, and that, secondly, there is no experience and thus no observation that isn’t already marked or, as he (20) puts it, compromised by language. Simply put, no matter what happens, no matter how we try to get around the issue, there’s no brute, purely material experience that we can communicate to others, although that I-experience comes close to it, as all experience is marked by language. He (29) summarizes this in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language’:
“[A]nything and everything occurring within the organism can become the material of experience, since everything can acquire semiotic significance, can become expressive.”
However, thinking is more than material. It requires something else, which he (29) goes on to clarify:
“Any psyche that has reached any degree of development and differentiation must have subtle and pliable semiotic material at its disposal, and semiotic material of a kind that can be shaped, refined, and differentiated in the extra-corporeal social milieu in the process of outward expression. Therefore, the semiotic material of the psyche is preeminently the word—inner speech.”
Simply put, thinking is sign based or, as it is more contemporarily often expressed, a matter of semiosis. This helps us to understand how he (36) defines introspection as self-observation:
“We do not see or feel an experience—we understand it.
So, what we see, or feel, is one thing, but what we think of it is another thing. This is particularly important as it means that we have no direct access to what we experience, what it is that we have, for example, seen or felt. In other words, inasmuch we speak of having experienced this or that, it is of utmost importance that we do not confuse it with our comprehension of it, as he (36) goes on to add:
“This means that in the process of introspection we engage our experience into a context made up of other signs we understand.”
To paraphrase this, there’s this experience, whatever it may be, which only appears to us as a sign, which we then make sense of in relation to other signs, as he (36) goes on to specify:
“A sign can be illuminated only with the help of another sign.”
It is also worth emphasizing that what we see, feel, or, more broadly speaking, sense, does retain its materiality. No one is questioning that. It’s rather that none of it makes sense to us without it appearing to us as a sign, in relation to other signs. In summary, what we deal with is not our experience, nor our observation, but our understanding of our experience, or of our observation. Importantly, that all comes from the outside, as he (37) points out:
“The understanding of any sign, whether inner or outer, occurs inextricably tied in with the situation in which the sign is implemented. This situation, even in the case of introspection, exists as an aggregate of facts from external experience, the latter commentating upon and illuminating a particular inner sign.”
So, in summary, we are tempted to think that it all starts from us, that there’s this language that has an existence of its own, no matter how linguists, especially historical linguists and, like Nietzsche, philologists, like to remind us that there is no fixed language, as such, and that we just magically have a connection to it (and that failing at that is just on you), but that’s not the case. Instead, how we experience the world is always colored by language, as emphasized by Vološinov (37-38).
Anyway, back to Nietzsche. Right, so, interpretation is best we can do, totally fine by me, but it does mean that what we are in the habit of calling truth or objectivity are just fairy tales, something we like to tell ourselves so that we can sleep better.
But, okay, so we can’t we be impartial? We can’t we step back and be objective? Well, as much as I like to promote taking a step back, there’s no such thing as taking a step back so far that you become impartial and thus objective. What I mean is that it totally makes sense to chill for a moment instead of just going with whatever, like just wait a moment, compose yourself, don’t get so worked up by whatever it is that you’re dealing (and I know, I know, it’s tough, super tough at times), because that allows you to think for a bit longer, to take other perspectives into consideration, as opposed to being self-assured that you know what’s what, like without any hesitation. He (267) also comments on this, explaining much more concisely why we cannot be truly impartial, nor objective:
“It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. 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.”
So, simply put, as the book title has it, it’s all about the will to power, that’s why we can’t be impartial, nor objective, even if it were possible, even if we didn’t rely on language to make sense of the world, as discussed in relation to Vološinov’s work. To put that in other, perhaps, more contemporary terms, we have all these desires according to which we act. No matter what you do, you cannot suppress them. Okay, maybe you can suppress some of them and maybe you already do that, in the sense that these desires compete with one another, each having this or that perspective, as he (267) puts it, but there’s no way you can put all of them on hold. If you could, well, then I reckon you’d be dead as you’d be no longer driven by anything, no longer striving for anything.
He further addresses subjectivity, just in case you missed his point about it also being absurd. For him (267-268), the Cartesian formula of ‘I think’ is just stupid because it simply takes it for granted that there’s this ‘I’ that can just cause the thinking to happen, as well as what else one does to happen. He (268) expands on that, noting that, okay, let’s say there’s thinking, but why must there then be a thinker? His (268) answer is that grammar compels us to think this way, that there must be “a doer to every deed.” In his (268), René Descartes fails to prove anything about “reality in itself”, except his own belief in the matter, which is, merely, “an apparent reality.”
The underlying problem here, with truth and knowledge, is that objectivity and subjectivity both rely on the same thing, the subject, which, for him (268), is something that we’ve come to take for granted, probably because it’s really, really convenient for us. As he (268) puts it:
“The concept of substance is a consequence of the concept of the subject: not the reverse!”
So, yeah, subjectivity and objectivity both hinge on what we are in habit of referring to as the subject, the self, the ‘I’. But what happens if we let go of that? Nothing catastrophic. We do just fine without it. It’s just that the sense of one is understood differently, as he (268) goes on to add:
“One acquires degrees of being, one loses that which has being.”
What is this acquisition of degrees of being? Well, he doesn’t use the word here, but it’s becoming. One then becomes oneself, instead of already being oneself. This also applies to just about everything, as noted by him (268):
“Critique of ‘reality’: where does the ‘more or less real,’ the gradation of being in which we believe, lead to?”
To answer his own question, which I’ve already answered, he (268) states that:
“The degree to which we feel· life and power (logic and coherence of experience) gives us our measure of ‘being,’ ‘reality,’ not-appearance.”
In other words, the important thing here is that it’s all about becoming, that there aren’t these beings, things that simply have being. In short, it is what it is, not because it has this and/or that being, but because it has become that way. That’s the reality of it all, without any need to think of any of that in terms of truth or falsity.
So, what is the subject then for him? And is it of any use to us? Well, I’ll let him (268) summarize that:
The subject: this is the term for our belief in a unity underlying all the different impulses of the highest feeling of reality[.]”
The key thing to notice here is that he is indeed calling the subject a belief. It is something that we believe in hopes of making sense of reality, what I guess he’d (268-269) be willing to call a self-centered reality, considering that it all seems to then appear to the subject as if by the subject and for the subject.
To get back on track here, on perspectivism, he (273) reminds us that we believe in certain things to the point that we simply take them for granted. For example, we like to think of causality as a given, a law of nature, but it is, as he (273) puts it, “a very well acquired habit of belief”. Such beliefs are, of course, highly useful to us, he (273) does acknowledge that, but they still just beliefs, not truths by any means.
I think this is enough, for now. But what was the point of this essay? Well, think of what you will, of course, and feel free to disagree. If it is of use to you, it is of use to you and if it isn’t, then it isn’t, as I like to tell people. Good for me. Good for you? I don’t know. I guess that depends on your … perspective.
References
- Nietzsche, F. ([1901] 1968). The Will to Power (W. Kauffman and R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage Books.
- Nietzsche, F. ([1887] 2006). On the Genealogy of Morality (C. Diethe, Trans.). Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
- Oxford English Dictionary Online (n. d.). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
- Serres, M. ([1980] 1982). The Parasite (L. R. Schehr, Trans.). Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Vološinov, V. N. ([1930] 1973). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik, Trans.). New York, NY: Seminar Press.
- Vološinov, V. N. ([1927] 1976). Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (N. H. Bruss, Ed.; I. R. Titunik, Trans). New York, NY: Academic Press.