Meditation 69: Two Relativisms

Relativism is the view that our preferences and perspectives indelibly color the judgments we make. Furthermore, our preferences and perspectives are themselves relative to physical constitution, upbringing, culture, local customs, and common beliefs.  There has been a running battle in philosophy over whether, and to what extent, relativism overturns claims to objective knowledge. Relativism, thus conceived, is associated with skepticism about the possibility, scope and limits of human knowledge.

A paradox of relativism is the difficulty of defending its truth in a straightforward way. For example, we might ask “From which perspective is relativism true?”  If all our judgments are relative to one perspective or another, relativism itself appears relative, and of no greater weight than one that denies relativism and claims access to objective truth.

Despite this paradox, the relativism of human judgments and values has refused to go away. From a non-dogmatic perspective, relativism expresses undoubted truths. Sometimes it feels hot to you and cold to me. A hot left hand feels cold in lukewarm water, and a cold right hand feels hot in the same water. Opera lovers enjoy operas, and non-lovers dislike them. From one political orientation or ideology, tax cuts look like a good thing; from another, they look bad. Who is right? The natural thing to say is that in some cases, at least, being right or wrong is relative to orientation and perspective. We can be certain in ourselves that we are right, but this is unavoidably relative to the conditions and experiences that formed our beliefs and desires. Certainty is no criterion of truth.

Given that relativism remains a permanent possibility of thought, how are we to regard it so that is does not undermine our investigations into the truth of various matters? I see two sorts of relativism. The first is aggressive and proud of itself. It says that all truths are relative to the individuals who hold them, and that truth itself is perspectival. There is only truth from a perspective, and each perspective guarantees the truth of its object.  All judgments are true for those who make them. This is a relativism of despair, for nothing prevents perspectival truths from clashing, and there is no way to adjudicate between them.

A better form of relativism reaches a more humble result. As well as saying that truth is a matter of perspective, we ought also to say that falsehood is a matter of perspective. What the existence of relativism shows is that our views are partial. Their partiality derives from the different perspectives that undoubtedly affect how human beings make their judgments and valuations.

Humble relativism advises us not to take the perspectival nature of our judgments and valuations to show that what we think is simply right, and that what others think is simply wrong.  Remembering relativism helps us to be suspicious of our own beliefs and judgments. We must remember that no matter how convinced we are in the rightness of our cause or truth, such convictions do not count as evidence for them. Conversely, it reminds us that we may learn something from those whose perspectives differ from ours. However partial the views of humans inevitably are, they may have an angle on reality that we should try to understand before we dogmatically condemn the ‘other.’  It is hard to listen carefully to a person one knows is ‘wrong’ from the start, just because he or she believes something different from oneself.

Relativism can move in different directions. It can become dogmatic about perspectivism, or it can become humble about partial human truths. The first makes relativism into an absolute, while the second simply puts it into the mixture of thought and investigation. Such a view of relativism does not foreclose on the question of objective truth or the superiority of some judgments over others. However, it does prevent us from becoming dogmatic about the adequacy of any single framework of understanding, thus doing justice to the complexities of the world we try, with difficulty, to understand.