Propositions and perspectives
Ours is an age of computational and propositional tyranny. A kind of deep cultural tyranny which has not ceased to eat into more and more of our personal and social life since Descartes unleashed his groundbreaking ideas.
Data and propositions about an objective reality in the service of whose discovery and knowing we are called to leave our subjective selfs behind. Opinion and fact, irreducible to each other. The inner and the outer, clashing rather than shaping each other.
Most, if not all, of our cultural wars are propositional wars. Propositions holding intentions captive to reductionist interpretations. Propositions come first, people second. Making ourselves impervious to transformation, denying ourselves the adoption of other people’s perspectives. Only propositions become adoptable, and rarely do they allow their owners to swap them. Their force lies in the words used to express them, and we’ve never been more allergic to one word or another than today.
But lying under the surface of propositional knowing is a kind of perspectival positioning which allowed those propositions to be adopted in the first place. In leadership training, it is axiomatic to think that behaviours, rather than information, are the cause of change. Information, that is propositional knowing, does little to move a person, a group, or an organisation. But perspectival knowing, which rather than truth is concerned with one’s salience landscaping, seeing things differently to discover what is more relevant and what is less so, has the power to effect change.
In practical terms, perspectival shifting is about putting oneself in someone else’s shoes, exercising patience and empathy, a kind of understanding that doesn’t seek to answer the question ‘is it true or not’, but how is a view different from another, what visibility it affords and what it hides from view, and from relevance. It is about the kind of dialogue which happens less and less in our culture, the suspending of one’s allergic reactions and nervous sorespots, and seeing the world and self through different eyes.
