For any given situation there are many perspectives.
My mom used to say (and still does), "there are three sides to a story: your side, their side, and the truth."
I still agree, except that now I see that no two people have exactly the same perspective on everything, so there are as many perspectives on a given object or situation as there are observers.
What does this mean?
How does it apply in every day life and thought in general?
Well, for one thing, this thought is the very one that gave birth to post modernism--the idea that everything is relative, including truth. You've probably heard the phrase, "there's no such thing as absolute truth," but something is fundamentally wrong with that claim, since that statement itself is a declaration which must be seen as being absolutely true. This is an obvious contradiction.
The fact is, all the various perspectives of a given object do NOT change the object itself. The object being observed cannot be altered simply because someone perceives it to be different from the way that it is.
Take a garden, for example. This is a garden flourishing with all species of plants--from herbs and flowers to trees and grasses. Seven observers may take an amble through this garden and each have a different perspective on what the garden is, how it could be improved, and what is amazing about it. For one person, the garden might be too random--they say it needs more structure. Another might say that the garden lacks butterflies. And still another might add that there are too many birds and crickets. All in all, while each observation and recommendation is equally valid as well as equally arguable, none of these things change the garden itself, since it cannot be defined by any one person.
Another great example is that of Literature. Those of you who have taken upper-level literature courses know what I'm talking about when I mention the "Post modern perspective". This is the view that believes a reader can take any piece of literature and extract whatever meaning he/she desires, even if it has nothing to do with the author's original intended message. Feminist theorists, for instance, often find passages defending (for lack of a better word) feminism in novels that were written long before the feminist perspective was even close to being part of the present reality. It's perfectly valid to have a perspective on a piece of literature, to make it your own by deriving meaning that applies to your own life. However, it's an entirely different thing to claim that an author (who had no intention of doing so) was defending those ideas in his/her book(s).
So I find it important to distinguish between perspective and interpretation; perspective being one's view on a certain subject, and interpretation being one's translation of what the author of a given literary work actually meant based on language, structure, and
audience.
To tie this in with the idea of absolute truth:
It is good to remember that there are millions of sides to a story: there's your side, everyone else's side, and the Truth. Despite what anyone claims to be true, there is still that "side" which remains unchangeable. People jump to the conclusion too often that just because we can't figure out what the truth is of a given subject, that must mean that there is no truth. Although we may never know the truth fully--for to do that, we'd have to become united with it somehow by stepping outside of the realm of finite, changeable perspectives--we must never forget that, just as Mulder said in the X-Files,
"The Truth is out there."
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
