Aims: A Brief Metaphysics for Today

Chapter 3. Interlude on Method

Chapter 3 Interlude on Method 3.1 PERSPECTIVES AND HORIZONS Every act of understanding, including this attempted metaphysical analysis of immediate experience, is inevitably perspectival. For all forms of knowledge are perspectival . Here is what I mean. I say “perspectival” by analogy with visual perception. Everything we see, we see from a particular standpoint or perspective. If there be a perspectiveless view of anything, we haven’t got it and can’t even imagine what it would be like. Furthermore, the perspective from which anything can be viewed naturally defines a “horizon” of all possible objects that can be seen from that perspective. The crow’s nest on a ship provides a wider and more distant horizon than is available from the bridge. Perspective and horizon are linked polarities within vision. If we stretch the analogy, perspective can also refer to the visual capacities of the viewer. Even within the band of electromagnetic energy within which human vision takes place, some people see more sharply than others. It is also established 17 Felt-03 7/27/07 2:52 PM Page 17 that some animals or insects see within a somewhat different band of the light-energy spectrum than we do. They can be said to see from a different perspective that defines for them a different horizon of possible objects of their vision. The analogy takes on still more interest when applied to the set of expectations or preconceptions that inevitably color our intellectual understanding of any situation. Even in our vision we tend to see what we were expecting to see. All the more is this true with regard to the preconceptions that underlie understanding. We tend to understand situations from the perspective of the preconceptions that we bring to the experience . Perhaps that is why one seldom wins an argument concerning religion or politics. Here is an illustration of the relation between perspective and horizon. Suppose that three persons are standing side by side viewing a landscape. The first is a military commander, the second a real estate developer, the third an artist. I think there is a clear sense in which, although they all are looking at the same valley, each one sees a different valley from what the others see. One sees a possible avenue for attack or defense; another sees a site for profitable construction; the third sees a configuration of colors and forms. What they see is experiential and is a function of the intentional perspectives they bring to the experience. None sees a valley-in-itself because none experiences a valley-in-itself. But the experienced, seen valley is different for each, according to the difference of their respective perspectives, even though the same looked-at (not experienced ) valley is causally operative in each experience. The same is true of any theoretic understanding of what is given in experience. Were I competent to do so, I could elect to analyze the characteristics of experience described in the previous chapter purely from the standpoint of electrochemical brain reactions. In so doing I could understand a good deal about them but only from that limited perspective, for the choice of that conceptual perspective automatically limits the horizon of intelligibility to the electrochemical domain. It pro- — A I M S 18 18 Felt-03 7/27/07 2:52 PM Page 18 vides no information as to whether or not other domains of understanding are available for fathoming experience. The horizon or field for understanding, then, is determined by the conceptual perspectives that we bring to the analysis. These perspectives are chiefly embodied in the philosophic principles that we adopt for the sake of understanding. Some of these principles are only implicit and taken for granted, the result of temperament and social conditioning, but all the more powerful for being hidden. Others are deliberately chosen. 3.2 SENSE PERCEPTION IS PERSPECTIVAL By now it is clear that sense perception, as we described it in chapter 2, is itself through and through perspectival. The acuity of our sense organs, the sort of medium available (for instance, the kind of light), and our physical situation with respect to the object, constitute together a particular perspective from or through which we sense the object. The appearing object , as thoroughly relational, embodies all these factors.1 This is just to say that it belongs to the horizon of sensibility governed by that perspective. 3.3 ON CHOOSING...