#perspectivalism

[sourceofthestream]

The story of the blind men and the elephant traces itself across Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu sources, painting a portrait of the various interpretations of reality that emerge from missing the forest for its trees.

Continued: https://unityinplurality.blogspot.com/2020/07/seeing-the-elephant.html

[astranemus]

Textual evidence supports the view that some Madhyamikas accept increasingly sophisticated expressions of conventional truth even though, as a matter of philosophical principle, they deny that any statement expresses ultimate meaning. The inner logic of this worldview demands that, since spectrums too have their upper and lower limits, Madhyamikas embrace the notion of a limitless continuum of degrees of truth, which is always relative to an individual’s current level of insight.

...

The soteriological goal of Buddhism informs its philosophy to the core, so that freedom, rather than merely theorizing about freedom, is the objective. Abandonment of views is identified early on in the Buddhist tradition as necessary for the attainment of spiritual freedom but resonates with particular force in the Madhyamaka tradition. If adopting any metaphysical perspective as definitive is, as Nagarjuna maintains, an impediment to the cultivation of the Buddhist path, then, presumably, all such perspectives must be relinquished. Madhyamaka would therefore regard resolute commitment to any stance on free will as cognitively unwarranted and morally debilitating. Through abandoning the idea that beliefs reflect objective reality, people may realize that apparently rival theories in fact express different degrees of insight. It follows that these ‘conflicting’ perspectives on free will are, in a more profound sense, harmonious. The task of harmonizing such theories as hard determinism and compatibilism, however, constitutes a psychological as well as a philosophical challenge. The best hope of meeting it lies in harnessing the force of a hierarchical notion of truth.

Katie Javanaud, Reformulating the Buddhist Free Will Problem: Why There can be no Definitive Solution

[inqinqinq-blog]

From now on, my philosophical colleagues, let us be more wary of the dangerous old conceptual fairy-tale which has set up a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless, subject of knowledge’, let us be wary of the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge as such’: – here we are asked to think an eye which cannot be thought at all, an eye turned in no direction at all, an eye where the active and interpretative powers are to be suppressed, absent, but through which seeing still becomes a seeing-something, so it is an absurdity and non-concept of eye that is demanded. There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’.

Nietzsche, GM III 11