Do philosophies disagree?
Lately I have been fascinated by the prospect of a certain kind of philosophical pluralism. Here I am going to try to give an argument to justify it.
What would it mean for two people to disagree? I take it that X and Y disagree if they are talking about the same thing and describe it in mutually incompatible ways. If two people are in genuine disagreement, then they cannot both in contact with the truth. On the other hand, I understand “philosophical pluralism” to be the view that the major schools of philosophy are all in contact with the truth, as a result of which they cannot be understood as really disagreeing with each other.
Can there be any way of establishing philosophical pluralism? I think it would be possible if one could show that the truth of one philosophy does not require the falsity of another. Here is an attempt.
(1) Something can only be spoken about if it appears. We cannot talk about things unless they are in some sense apparent or visible to us. This does not mean that the thing has to be apparent or visible in the sense of being right in front of us, i.e. visible to the eyes. But if we are going to talk about something, we have to think of that thing as having some kind of content. It has to be “visible” to the mind in some way, even if it is not visible to the eyes.
(2) The appearance of any particular thing is always mediated and perspectival. Phenomenological reflection reveals that what appears to us in conscious experience is not first and foremost the individual object, e.g. this cat or that dog, but rather the whole, ourselves included, and all at once. I see not only the cat, but the cat in the position in which it finds itself at the moment I see it, in a shared space within which are found other objects, each influencing the appearance of the other; and I see all these things through the dual filter of my lived body (e.g., my sense of sight, the position in which I find myself) and my thought-life (my picture of the world, my habits of interpretation, my capacity to recognize things, my current interests and preoccupations, etc.). I never simply experience the world “out there” directly. Rather, I only ever experience the world simultaneously with myself.
(3) A difference in appearance demands a difference in the conditions of appearance. Once the conditions within which an appearance takes place are fixed, there is only one way things can look. Once I take into consideration all the factors within which some experience occurs, I can see that the way things look to me at that point is the only way they could look to me. A difference in appearance would demand that something be different somewhere: either the position of my body must be different, or my senses would have to be different, or my thought-life would have to be other than what it is, or the external world-object would have to be different in some way. The only way for things to appear differently is for something in the “formula” of appearance (world-objects, lived body, and thought-life) to be different.
(4) Therefore, disagreement can only be superficial. Suppose X and Y describe one and the same thing in different ways. Suppose further that they are describing this one and the same thing exactly as it appears to them. Because the thing appears differently, it follows that the conditions of appearance are different for X than they are for Y. They are not the same in some way: either they are not positioned in the same way, or else their senses are not equally sharp, or else they do not mean the same things by the same words, or else the object they are describing does not look the same as seen from different angles, or whatever.
Now, X and Y both talk about one and the same thing. They both say, “This thing is (or is not) F.” They say this because the thing looks or does not look F to them. But although they say that the thing is or is not F, they should sooner say that the thing appears or does not appear F from their point of view. If they were to realize the perspectival nature of appearance, they would have to be more accurate and say, “This thing looks (or does not look) F to me right now.” They cannot simply say that the thing is or is not F, because they do not simply see the thing such as it is. They see the thing such as they experience it. In other words, they experience the thing and themselves at the same time. And because they are different, the experience is not the same for the both of them. They cannot simply say what the thing is, because they do not have experience of what the thing is tout court. They must say what the thing is such as it shows itself to each of them. But at this point they are no longer saying mutually incompatible things, and so they do not disagree.
So philosophical pluralism can be defended on the basis of the perspectival nature of appearances. Disagreement is only possible when the philosophies overstep their bounds and make unjustified statements about the way things are, rather than about the way things look when seen from a certain perspective. If the philosophies “reel in” their statements so that they are experientially justified, then they do not disagree with each other.
Now, pluralism is not relativism. It does not require that one think that people live in separate worlds with no overlap with each other. People can all live in the same world and be in contact with the same reality. But people go beyond the appropriate limits when they describe this reality as simply being so and so. Their language is deceptively objective whereas their actual experience of the world does not justify this. It would be more accurate to say that things look so and so from where they stand and at the moment of the appearance. But if they describe things this way, then they need not ever disagree with each other, and they are still all in contact with the same world.
But does this mean that all perspectives are equally valid? No, it does not. I think a philosophical pluralism can grant that some perspectives are better than others. But that is a topic for another time…
