Perspective on Perspectives

Abstract

Romanticism, through its stress on the uniqueness of the artist’s personal vision and its recognition that cultures widely separated in time and space have viewed the world differently, generated a sense of the relativity of different perceptual standpoints. Truth did not thereby become problematic, but it did become a potential problem. The very notion of ‘perspectives’ as employed in the title of this book is itself a symptom of what it also analyses, since it postulates an approach that is plural and multiform rather than stable, monoscopic and fixed. Yet this usage, so commonplace, is altogether more recent than we might be disposed to recognise. The deployment of ‘perspectives’ as a plural noun rather than in its singular form is characteristically twentieth-century usage, yet it is possible to be more specific than that. Current issues of the R. R. Bowker catalogue of books in print list upward of 250 titles beginning with the word ‘Perspectives’, not to mention the many others that figure as ‘New Perspectives’ and so forth; yet the Cumulative Book Index for January 1949—December 1950 listed only four such titles, and scarcely any can be found in preceding years.