A Hegelian Perspective on Perspectivalism
November 4, 2021
Some follow up thoughts to an objection to perspectivalism I raised in Against Metamodernism. What I’d like to do here is consider how a core theme in Hegelian dialectics—namely the experience of error—can inform this discussion, as it has taken shape in metamodernism and adjacent spaces.
But first some clarification about the relationship between perspectivalism and metamodernism, which will help to frame the main point. The nature of this relationship was one point of disagreement in the discussion I had with Greg Dember in response to the piece (reproduced in a more readable format here). My assertion was that metamodernist ‘oscillation’ licenses a perspectivalist epistemology; Greg’s objection was that perspectivalism is postmodern, not metamodern—that perspectivalism can be construed as an ‘oscillation across perspectives’ is simply not relevant to metamodernism, which is defined by the more specific oscillation between modernism and postmodernism.
To me this seems overly coy. It is not difficult to see why a general perspectival oscillation might follow from a specific oscillation between modern and postmodern sensibilities. If we must speak this way, then epistemologically what characterises modernism is optimistic universalism, and what characterises postmodernism is pessimistic perspectivalism. Postmodernism asserts the impossibility of the universal, and from this derives a quietist moral: don’t bother trying to get outside your local perspective, in doing so you’ll surely replicate some structure of oppression or other—so don’t bother. A metamodern epistemological sensibility, then, would be one of optimistic perspectivalism (one that celebrates rather than mourns the loss of the universal standpoint). And what is it that is expressed in the call to actively oscillate between perspectives if not this optimistic dimension? This sensibility is perspectivalist, but not quietist: there is no universal perspective, it says, but this is no reason to retire into apathetic detachment, and there is good honest work to be done traversing and integrating the various local ones. (When Greg writes that “what’s metamodern is oscillation between multi-perspectival relativism and enthusiastic conviction” this seems to me to carry a similar sentiment, though we have disagreed on this issue.)
(One question that could be raised at this point, but rarely is: what about pessimistic universalism? Doesn’t this hold just as much claim to be the product of an oscillation between modern and postmodern sensibilities? Actually, one person who could potentially be described as a pessimistic universalist is Žižek. And incidentally, it is Žižek who represents one of the other major attack vectors against postmodernism. To the best of my knowledge this is a vector that metamodernist thought is yet to engage with.)
Let’s step back to consider what is really being aimed at here. If we look carefully at the characterisations of the modern and postmodern given above, it becomes clear that they share a presupposition. Modernism claims epistemic authority because it thinks it has access to the universal perspective; postmodernism holds that since there is no universal perspective any claim to epistemic authority is a pretence—what they share is the belief that insofar as it exists, epistemic authority belongs to and only to the universal perspective. This shared presupposition reveals a way to disagree with both the modern and the postmodern attitude: to break this deadlock, what is required is a theory of epistemic authority which neither grants it arbitrarily to some particular local perspective, nor to and only to the universal perspective.
What we’d really like is for epistemic authority to emerge bottom-up, as some kind of collaboration between local perspectives. Presumably this is what people are going for when they talk about things like ‘both-and’ reasoning. But the details matter, and are often neglected. Of course, one way to solve our problem would be to treat all local perspectives as intrinsically authoritative. It seems to me that this is the solution that optimistic perspectivalism has a tendency to drift towards, an idea often expressed with perhaps the most leaky metaphor of all time: the blind men and the elephant. While usually invoked as a justification for religious pluralism, this metaphor can function as a stand in for the perspectivalist ethos in general. We know how it goes: each guy gets hold of a different part of the elephant, and they all argue with each other about how it really is.
The superficial lesson sometimes drawn from this metaphor is that their conflicts are an illusion because they are all right. The superficiality lies in the conflation the de re and de dicto aspects of speech, or what is being spoken of and what is being said about it. To illustrate: an initiate of advaita vedanta might speak of ‘samadhi’ while a Zen practioner might speak of ‘satori,’ and it might be concluded that they are referring to the same mystical experience. But nevertheless there are incompatibilities: Zen, for instance, sometimes speaks of ‘little’ or ‘partial’ satori, whereas samadhi is unequivocally an absolute state, something attained in full or not at all. That they speak of the same thing does not imply that there is no tension in what they have to say about it. Indeed the conflicting implications of these concepts seems to imply that at least one of them must be wrong, or that their referents do not coincide as first assumed.
Put like that, I doubt many would disagree—the mistake here is clearly the inference from the banal observation that all perspectives have something useful to contribute to the spurious claim that they are all, in some nontrivial sense, true. Alarm bells should really have been ringing from the get go, because if this were the case then there would be no need for any kind of collaboration between perspectives, since they would in effect come ‘pre-furnished’ with epistemic authority.
It is at this point that the Hegelian intervention can be made. It consists in the assertion that the useful thing each perspective can contribute is precisely the way in which it is wrong. The collaborative project that the various perspectives are engaged in is to be understood, on this model, in terms of the integration of error. When one blind man says it is a square while another says it is a circle, integration will have been achieved only at the point that it has been mutually understood exactly why it is that a circular thing sometimes appears to be square, or why a square thing sometimes appears to be circular, or why something which is neither square nor circular sometimes appears to be square and at others appears to be circular. Only once such an understanding has been reached will it be possible to combine the two perspectives into a synoptic vision.
There’s a number of points to make about this. The first is that this collaboration depends critically on the mutual recognition of a possibility of error, of a gap between reality and appearance. And it this possibility that is subtly elided by the empty validation of optimistic perspectivalism—in granting a sui generis epistemic authority to the perspective of the other, the perspectivalist tacitly removes the authority of any other perspective to challenge it in any meaningful way. The form of recognition required by the Hegelian model does not, in contrast, place an unchallengeable epistemic authority anywhere. Instead it aims to radicalise the challenge: the authority I must grant to the other is precisely the authority to challenge my authority. The structure of epistemic authority instituted by this configuration is stable in virtue of its symmetry, supported by the mutual recognition among participant perspectives of an epistemic responsibility to one another.
Second, the central role it finds for error (negation) is what allows the Hegelian picture to avoid the universalist move. This is because a God’s eye view is not needed to discover that a perspective has erred—all you need is a second angle on the elephant.
Third, it also avoids the opposite problem of empty antagonism. The crucial point here is that it is not enough to simply point out that some perspective is in error—in this case nothing positive would be learned. The collaborative aspect shows up only in the process of uncovering the exact how and why of the mistake. The experience of error is an experience with a content—this content represents what it is possible to learn in such an experience, the positive dimension of error captured in the Hegelian concept of ‘determinate negation.’ The difference between formal and determinate negation (between stating that someone is wrong and explaining how they are wrong) is often under appreciated, fuelling some of the more misguided criticisms of Hegelian dialectics (the ‘Deleuzian’ critique, for instance).
This final point helps to make clear what is practically at stake in this question. I’m sure no-one who subscribes to something like ‘earnest perspectivalism’ or ‘epistemic metamodernism’ or ‘both-and’ reasoning or whatever would endorse any kind of naive, create-ur-own-reality theory of epistemic legitimacy. Everyone with skin in this game is officially aiming at some kind of collaborative model, a discursive praxis which can actually produce effective consensus while drawing only on resources provided by local, situated perspectives, and without hypostasising some fictional universal viewpoint. But this project will remain vacuous so long as it merely emphasises a conjunctive over a disjunctive attitude (‘both-and’ over ‘either-or’), or conflates paying compliments with close reading.
Everyone knows it’s good to read across conflicting perspectives. But what does this ‘reading’ really entail? Does it mean stepping up onto the balcony to survey the battlefield, mediating the beef from a neutral distance? Or is it about inviting everyone to stop fighting and join you on the balcony? It is neither, because there is no balcony. What it means to read across a conflict between X and Y is to get down there in the pit and cross swords with both of them. In practice this means performing interpretive labour: translating them into a common idiom to make disagreements explicit, identifying and rejecting particular background assumptions, uncovering ambiguities and deciding them in one direction or the other, and so on. Each of these activities is essential if anything like ‘reading’ can be said to be happening, and each of them is impossible without exposing and implicating the commitments of the reader.