Multi-Scale Perspectivism
Description
Eric Schaetzle:
"Broadly speaking, there is a shared perspective between all these theorists, each in their own way making our concepts "more complete".
- Peter Corning suggested society is a superorganism.
- Thomas Metzinger called it a "suprapersonal model".
- Dennett and Levin proposed that selves can scale into a "superagent".
- Hanzi Freinacht (Daniel Görtz and Emil Friis) calls this a "transpersonal perspective", referencing Deleuze's comment that society is made up of "dividuals".
- And John Deely understood relation in its "suprasubjective character".
The concept of suprasubjectivity was a means by which C.S. Peirce attempted to resolve (and transcend) an on-going philosophical dispute between those who characterize existence as mind-dependent (ens rationis) and those who characterize it as mind-independent being (ens reale), i.e., between idealist and realist schools of thought. Such an approach tries to reconcile “scientific” (realist/objective) knowledge with humanities subjects (idealist/subjective) interpretations of the world. From a suprasubjective position the concept of a sign is “neither strictly subjective, neither strictly objective.” [Incidentally, according to Peirce all claims about reality are radically subject to error (fallibilism), which is not far from Rovelli's relational interpretation.]
There are still more lines of support for multi-scale perspectivism, making “la décolonisation de la pensée” a project we can all embark upon. As Rovelli pointed out in Helgoland, scholars have noted that it is foundational to Mahāyāna Buddhist schools (pratītyasamutpāda doctrine and mūlamadhyamakakārikā text), Jain (anekāntavāda doctrine), Daoist (Zhuangzi famously said "among you, me, and others, none knows which is right"), and other Eastern philosophical traditions. In his book A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, Feng Youlan wrote "Philosophy gives no information about matters of fact, and so cannot solve any problems in a concrete and physical way. What it can do, however, is to give man a point of view. From the practical point of view, philosophy is useless, yet it can give us a point of view which is very useful. To use an expression of the Zhuangzi, this is the usefulness of the useless." (115) In the below passage, about how there is ultimately no perspective capable of transcending the totality of all that is, he effectively presaged the relational concepts discussed in Helgoland:
- "I said that philosophy is systematic reflective thinking on life. Because of its reflective nature, it ultimately has to think on "something" that logically cannot be the object of thought. For instance, the universe, because it is the totality of all that is, cannot logically be the object of thought... Since the universe is the totality of all that is, therefore when one thinks about it, one is thinking reflectively, because the thinking and the thinker must also be included in the totality. But when one thinks about that totality, the totality that lies in one's thought does not include the thought itself. For it is the object of the thought and so stands in contrast to it. Hence the totality that one is thinking about is not actually the totality of all that is. Yet one must first think about totality in order to realize that it is unthinkable. One needs thought in order to be conscious of the unthinkable, just as sometimes one needs sound in order to be conscious of silence. One must think about the unthinkable, yet as soon as one tries to do so, it immediately slips away. This is the most fascinating and also most troublesome aspect of philosophy." (337)
We can recall that Schrödinger said that quantum mechanics “deals only with the object–subject relation” and that this is the genesis of Rovelli's relational ontology. Peirce called the physicist's relational ontology "secondness". It is a dyadic relation (the relate and the correlate) characterized by reaction and resistance. (Iain McGilchrist said "Without some degree of resistance, without some degree of opposition, nothing comes into being.") Meanwhile, semioticians in the tradition of C.S. Peirce attempt to answer a different question: "How is it possible for something observed to signify something other than itself?" Is there a relationship between observation and the concept of interpretation within Peircean semiotics? Interpretation is of central concern to the work of Terrance Deacon and the broader biosemiotic community of researchers. Peirce called the semiotician's notion of interpretation "thirdness". It is a triadic relation characterized by representation or mediation. In thirdness, Schrödinger's 'object-subject relation' yields to processes of combinatorial complexity, of differentiation and combination, to form increasingly complex semiotic webs (Hoffmeyer) of 'representamen plus object' that are accessible to cognitive agents at higher 'integrative levels' (Salthe), those typically associated with biological life. There is a developmental structure operating here: thirdness is not possible without secondness. Peirce also imagined what he called "firstness", however physicists like Rovelli have pointed out that since there can be no observation without an observer, we can never observe firstness. As Feng Youlan points out, this would be attempting to "think about the unthinkable". Secondness may in fact be the most primitive ontological structure available for physics to operate with. The notion of pratītyasamutpāda is also that of secondness. Imre Hamar has noted that "In Mahayana thought, particularly Huayan, interdependent causality is understood as a web of causal relations defining reality: to say that something is real is to say that it participates in causal relations with other things that can be said to be real. This approach acknowledges reality [secondness], but not fundamental reality [firstness], and acknowledges causality, but not first cause, thus avoiding the kind of ontological commitment [essentialism] which Buddhism generally takes to be the most proximate cause of suffering. A key doctrine of Huayan is the mutual containment and interpenetration of phenomena or "perfect interfusion." So "How is it possible for something observed to signify something other than itself?" Rovelli points out that a correlation between any two objects only manifests itself in relation to a third. (96) For the concept of meaning to "mean" anything, it must perforce imply the minimal existence of a triadic structure due to the very nature of the process by which a correlation can be recognized.?"
(https://pedon.blogspot.com/2021/06/relationalism.html)
Discussion
The Western origins of perspectivism
Eric Schaetzle:
"The cultural zeitgeist of Western civilization for about the last half millenium has been afflicted by the presumption of an objectively knowable deterministic material fundament, one that must be graspable in principle. And accordingly, such grasping is preferably prerequisite to any decisive action taken. But this fundament does not exist, and the entire conceptual structure has the matter (as it were) entirely backwards. Recall that before Yangming, Zhuangzi famously said "Your life has a limit but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger." It is dangerous and foolish for a relative, and necessarily limited, perspective to pursue absolute objectivity, or claim to possess such a viewpoint. (cf. Ecclesiastes 1:18, 12:12, "Of making books there is no end and much study wearies the body.") Knowledge has lost none of it's importance, but our conceptual understanding of, and relationship to it, has become woefully confused making us vulnerable to the dangerous disease that both these sages warned us of. Knowledge, like facts, are relational. As Blaise Pascal noted, "man naturally cannot see everything"; there is no privileged "third person" perspective to acquire.
The Western origins of perspectivism can be found in the pre-Socratic philosophies of Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Protagoras. Plato's rejection and opposition to perspectivism formed a major cornerstone of his philosophy and principal element in his aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, and theology. This antiperspectivism made Plato a central target of critique for later perspectival philosophers such as Nietzsche. Who later, as we see, provided inspiration to Viveiros de Castro, who uses the philosophical terminology of Leibniz, Nietzsche, and Deleuze and Guattari in his approach to perspectivism. Nietzsche rejected the notions of absolute truth, external facts, and non-perspectival objectivity. In The Genealogy of Morals he wrote "the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing be." (This was a point frequently made by my professor, Walter Benesch.) Many interdisciplinary connections can (and have been) made. Rovelli notes that Bogdanov anticipated many ideas later popularized by Norbert Wiener, and the General Systems Theory of Ludwig von Bertalanffy (who influenced the development of process metaphysics and theoretical biology). Bogdanov proposed to unify all social, biological, and physical sciences by considering them as systems of relationships and by seeking the organizational principles that underlie all systems. Nicolas Rashevsky, a physicist turned mathematical biologist who was influenced by Bertalanffy among others, had a strong influence on Robert Rosen, who developed the modeling relation and relational biology (complex systems biology). Arran Gare noted how Rosen's approach lends significant support to the development of biosemiotics. Rosen argued that life itself has to be understood as the product of an interacting system, rather than being the separable parts into which the organism can be broken down. This is an important point of agreement between Rosen and Rovelli (and perhaps Karl Friston, with his emphasis on generalized synchrony)."
(https://pedon.blogspot.com/2021/06/relationalism.html)