Beyond Partiality: A Point of View
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“To recognize the limitations of our own perspectives is noble. To admire and take delight in other worldviews and political leanings that come into contrast with our own, well, that’s transcendent.”
We seem to be living in a time when people exhibit a perplexing capacity to disregard the complexity and nuance of any given situation in preference of their own particular, albeit partial point of view. Yet, none of us has a monopoly on truth. Indeed, the wisest among us seem to excel at seeking, considering, and synthesizing the value inherent in various points of view, demonstrating a rare conceptual fluidity and equanimity.
Our reality is informed by our perspective, which is informed by our location, time, state of body-mind, and those who inhabit our reality with us. We are subjects always standing somewhere, sometime, somehow in relationship to the objects of our experience—some what or who we are experiencing.
Thus, we both perceive and conceive our reality in every moment in an ever-unfolding, mutual process of becoming. The nature of our observing changes the nature of what we observe—and the nature of what we observe changes the nature of our observing, or to put it another way, how we observe changes what we observe, and what we observe changes how we observe.
Anyone who has ever participated in a still-life drawing class knows that the same object appears very differently when drawn from different perspectives. Likewise, it is well-known that witnesses to a crime often have very different accounts of the same event. To use yet another example, our experience of a concert while seated in the front row is likely to be different than our experience from the sidelines, the balcony or backstage.
Moreover, the conditions of our individual existence like our height, age, or health—a short eight-year-old with a runny nose or a tall thirty-eight-year old with near-sightedness—changes our experience. Our state of mind influences our perspective—whether we are in a bad or good mood, whether we are introspectively deep in thought or extrospectively outward-focused.
How others around us respond to a situation also affects our experience, as does our internalized upbringing, for example whether we learned to believe that concerts are evil activities of Satan or sublime gifts of genius. If others share their experience of the concert with us, our experience may shift again as we learn from different points of view. Even just prospectively imagining how we will feel following the concert can shift our experience of it. Similarly, the concert, viewed retrospectively from the perspective of hindsight may appear very differently than it did at the time of the event.
Our views are thus partial according to our conditions—where, when, and in what shape we are—and our conditioning—how we have learned to experience our conditions based on any number of salient familial, socio-cultural factors that influence our habitual ways of seeing ourselves, each other, and the world—our preferred points of view.
The view from here is often different from the view from there. The view from before is often different from the view from after. The view from now is often different from the view from then. The view of what is is often different from the perspective of what will or could be. The view from within is often different from the view from without.
We change the nature of our reality as we change our point of view, and our point of view changes with the changing nature of reality.
This multiple perspective-taking is reflected in our language in the form of singular and plural first-person, second-person, and third-person perspectives, as well as subjective and objective pronouns for each of the three personal perspectives, each variously intertwined within past, present, and future tenses. Often, my view, our view, your view, his or her view, and/or their view are (is, was, were, will be) different.
Furthermore, we are partial to particular perspectives which lead to partial expressions and practices—preferential ways of being and doing. Our experience of reality is thus constrained by the interdependent partiality of interdependent points of view. We are differentially perspectival. Each individual’s perspective is limited by each individual’s partiality, which not only limits each individual’s ability to experience everyone else’s perspectives, but also limits everyone else’s ability to experience reality inclusive of each one’s perspective ad infinitum.
In other words, our perspective is only as complete as the points of view that we are capable of inhabiting in any given situation.
If we hold our partial perspectives too tightly or assume that one point of view sees all, or if not all, all that matters, we lose sight of our larger integrity. At times, this can be more of an unconscious discrimination—a pattern of selectively tuning out or habitually overlooking particular points of view without necessarily realizing it. Influenced by the perspectives of those around us, particularly those perspectives held by those important to us, we simply assume that the view from over there as described by so-and-so is true without ever really examining it for ourselves.
Other times, we intentionally disregard particular perspectives—consciously refusing to explore alternative points of view available to us. We privilege a particular perspective at the expense of learning from others. We confirm our biases as in confirmation bias, and we simply see what we want to see.
Whether conscious or unconscious, without at least considering the veracity of multiple, often shifting perspectives in an ever changing world, we become imprisoned within the limited frames of our preferred perspectives.
Like the connective tissues of the body, if the connective tissues of a body of thought cease to function flexibly, elastically, and resiliently, the body loses its greater health and integrity, often resulting in pernicious, chronic imbalance, tension, and fragmentation. Orange (2000), as quoted by Blackstone (2007), remarks, “The rigidity that we associate with various kinds of psychopathology can be grasped as a kind of freezing of one’s experiential horizons so that perspectives remain unavailable.”
Developing our capacity to shift our perspectives and explore reality from various points of view is therefore an essential aspect of deepening and expanding our individual and collective capacity to act with greater integrity.
Just as our eyes must move in order to see, our perspectives must move and adapt to see with integrity. When we willingly explore different points of view about who we are and the nature of our existence, we open ourselves to seeing more wholly. We learn from one another’s perspectives and enrich our understanding. We suspend judgement and discriminate in service of the greatest truth that we are capable of perceiving, thus beginning to access and enact the wisdom within, between, and all around us.
People who are truly wise have a liberating capacity to grasp and release their assumptions and preferences, recognizing their knowing as merely a conceptual map that is currently serving their navigation of a much richer territory. They are willing to set their own map aside to use other conceptual maps to explore the same territory without ceding or leading with their own knowing.
They don't argue. They invite. They bemuse. They dance. And they do so with charming, disarming humility.
“The enlightened View has no bias, but it can embody whatever point of view is necessary for wisdom to function in a given life situation.”
A measure of wisdom, thus, becomes the ability to consciously experience and fluidly embody the infinite diverse perspectives available to each and all of us as much as possible, while also increasingly inhabiting the non-dual or integral consciousness beyond all such partial perspectives.