Your Perspective or Mine?

I’m Popeye, the sailor man
I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam
I yam what I yam what I yam what I yam
I’m Popeye the sailor man!

There’s no getting around it. We are who we are, and there is nothing to be done about it. If this sounds tautological, the implications are not necessarily obvious. For the greater part of our history, ideas about knowledge and the conveyance of knowledge tended to tamp down the subjective. Evidence, impartiality, and objectivity were what mattered. What didn’t matter, or matter as much, was what you, as a human being, thought. This may seem counterintuitive, but as Terry Eagleton points out in The Meaning of Life, the meaning a person attached to life—before 1600 or so—consisted by and large “of its function within a greater whole.” Our peculiarities and differences mattered less in defining us than did membership in the general category of human being. In fact, the word individual originally meant “indivisible” or “inseparable from,” and according to Eagleton, “Homer’s Odysseus seems to feel roughly this way, whereas Shakespeare’s Hamlet most definitely does not.”

Eagleton’s point, however, has more to do with how people expressed themselves than with the nature of their inner lives. Although I very much doubt that Homer or Seneca ever felt inclined to shout, “Me? Whee!”—as Muhammad Ali did in a 1975 speech he gave at Harvard—it’s equally hard to imagine that Petrarch or Leonardo did not regard himself as someone apart from the run of the mill. Eagleton is well aware that the concept of the individual emerged after the fact, but he also thinks that premodern people were less agitated about the meaning of existence “than, say, Albert Camus or the early T. S. Eliot.”

This bears pondering. If men and women did not see themselves as distinct from the polis or community, how to explain Dante’s narrator, who found himself alone in a dark wood around 1300 and whose presence, as Erich Auerbach wrote, first embodied the idea that “individual destiny is not meaningless, but is necessarily tragic and significant”? Tragedy doesn’t describe Benvenuto Cellini’s splashy 1566 Autobiography, but no one can accuse its author of self-effacement. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that the author of the Book of Job, written around the fifth century BCE, did not regard himself as a man different from his fellow men even if they shared a similar fate: “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.” In effect, subjectivity has been around since men and women decided that there were other men and women, but that doesn’t mean it counted for much, philosophically speaking.

Epistemology 101 students may recall the term “subjective idealism,” the idea that knowledge is restricted to one’s own perceptions—a counter to Platonic idealism, which holds that ideas (truth) exist independently of their apprehension. For Plato, sense-experience was but a shadow of reality, a condition that Bishop Berkeley, two millennia later, refined by showing that sight and touch affected our perception of the world, causing everyone to apprehend objects differently, thereby proving in Berkeley’s estimation that no such thing as objective reality existed—except in the mind of the Creator.

Unwilling to leave certainty in His/Her hands, Kant labored mightily to demonstrate that “while all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.” We ourselves possess the a priori faculties that literally shape the visible world, which is another way of saying that subjectivity also informs objectivity. So why should we be afraid of it even if it defies universal truth? It didn’t frighten William James, who in The Sentiment of Rationality (1879–80) averred,

‘Subjective’ be it called! and ‘disturbing’ to those whom it foils! … Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. … It is almost incredible that men who are themselves working philosophers should pretend that any philosophy can be, or ever has been, constructed without the help of personal preference, belief, or divination.

Independently of James, the German thinker Wilhelm Wundt, possibly the first person to identify himself as a psychologist, proposed that psychology examine human experience “in its immediately subjective reality.” And it was Nietzsche, some years later, who touted the mind’s involuntary and subjective relation to the world, a viewpoint that became known as “perspectivism.” “Everything is subjective,” he wrote in The Will to Power, but “subject” is “something added and invented and projected behind what there is. Even this is invention, hypothesis.” Nietzsche, who didn’t shy away from noting the shortcomings of other philosophers, thought they failed by neglecting their own perspectives, which led him to surmise that “every great philosophy” ends up being the “confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography.”

The obvious problem here is that of dueling perspectives: Can some be “more” objective than others? To which one can only reply that perspectivism does not impute the same value to all perspectives; it simply maintains that no one person has access to a view of the world that is somehow distinct from an already existing perspective. Ideally, such an awareness should lead to a greater understanding of other possible (plausible) realities, which, in turn, might clarify our own perceptions.