[D66] universalized perspectivism

[Antid Oto]

(Filosofische onderzoekingen)

Een lange relevante quote uit  Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with
Žižek, voor Dr. Fluks:

"I am even tempted to claim that there is a certain echo between this notion of
the Real and, at the very general level, the results of the cosmological
speculations in quantum physics where you also have this idea that, looked at
from in its totality, the universe is a void. This is the materialist position
that Deleuze called universalized perspectivism. It does not mean that there is
no reality, since everything is just a subjective perspective; it is more
radical than this. If we perceive a thing from a certain perspective, our
immediate impression tends to be that that perception belongs to a distorted
vision of what the thing is in itself. But the more radical conclusion of
universalized perspectivism is that if you take away the distorting perspective,
you lose the thing itself. Reality itself is the result of a certain distorting
perspective.
There is no positive reality outside these distortions. This insight - and here,
my God, I will turn almost New Age - is also present to some extent in
Nagarjuna, the founder of Mahayana Buddhism. What Nagarjuna argues is that where
Buddhism affirms the notion of the void sunyata (emptiness/nothingness), it is
not nothingness in the simple sense that there is nothing. The idea is, rather,
that every positive entity emerges from a distorted perspective and that nothing
exists objectively or independently from it. Objectively nothing exists, and
entities only emerge as the result of perspectival differentiation in which
every differentiation is a partial distortion.
Here we can see in what sense Lenin, in his Materialism and Empirico-Criticism,
tried to be materialist: he was obsessed with the notion of the mind reflecting
an objective reality existing outside. However, such a notion relies on a hidden
idealism, because the idea that outside of our reflection there is objective
reality presupposes that our mind, which reflects reality, functions as a gaze
somehow external to this reality. Universalized Perspectivism rejects any such
gaze. The point is not that there is no reality outside mind, the point is
rather that there is no mind outside reality. This distortion of reality occurs
precisely because our mind is part of reality. So when Lenin claims that we can
only arrive at objective reality in an endless asymptotic process of
approximation, what he overlooks is that our distortions of reality occur
precisely because we are part of reality and therefore have no neutral view of
it: our perception distorts reality because the observer is part of the
observed. It is this universalized perspectivism which, I think, contains a
radically materialist position.
The true formula of materialism is not that there is some noumenal reality
beyond our distorting perception of it. The only consistent materialist position
is that the world does not exist - in the Kantian sense of the term, as a
self-enclosed whole. The notion of the world as a positive universe presupposes
an external observer, an observer not caught in it. The very position from which
you can perceive the world as a self-enclosed whole is the position of an
external observer. It is thus paradoxically this radical perspectivism which
allows us to formulate a truly materialist position, not that the world exists
outside our mind, but that our mind does not exists outside the world. Lenin put
the accent on the wrong point. The problem of materialism is not 'does reality
exist outside?' The problem is 'does our mind exist?' How does my mind exist and
how is it inherent to reality?"