2024-08-24-Points of View

Session

Lesson

A point of view is an architectural phenomenon, but a corner, a nook, a cranny, never to be mistaken for the building in its entirety.

Each individual point of view makes up an ever expanding resume of experience, which in its accumulated complexity is a marvel, a miracle. You, a person, are the commander of all you survey. But it is so specific a surveillance, so parametered a view that it is only worthwhile when one realizes its very limitation - all-encompassing for you the individual but ultimately meagre if not brought into balance with all other miraculous but equally limited points of view.

Your point of view is your window onto the world - a spectacular vantage point from which to puruse and assess the world as it parades before you. But that parade started out of your sight line and will continue on after it has passed you by and left you to ponder what you've seen. So your view of things, clear and thorough as far as it goes, cannot possibly go far enough. That parade will require others to see it as it marches further down the street, just as others will have seen its beginning, long before it came into your purview [consciousness]. And those many points of view - each utterly unique - are necessary for that metaphorical parade to be understood. No one can see the entire pageant.

But when many points of view are united, a whole picture emerges. Whether they agree with one another is beside the point -- would you want them to? Something much larger and greater is more likely to emerge if they don't, as long as all are willing to respect the other's point of view, that the other is a point of view, one that therefore cannot be wrong no matter how violently we may disagree with it. If each will maintain the understanding that "This is not the situation, it is only my point of view of the situation", then compromise can be reached. And compromise is the language, the politics, of God. [[Category: Mark Turnbull]