Relational Perspectivism in Anzaldúa and Lugones Contra Nietzsche

Nietzsche’s philosophy holds radical possibilities for feminist philosophy. He disrupted traditional philosophical accounts of what it means to be human and how we create values and generate knowledge. His genealogy of morals reveals that power relations, rather than rational ideals, bring values into being. Like many feminist philosophical projects, Nietzsche’s writings reverse many of the hierarchies that the Western philosophical canon had established—for example, valuing the mind over body, rationality over passion, and knowledge over fiction. Also like many feminist thinkers, Nietzsche challenges the modern concept of the human person as a rational subject and celebrates embodiment, passion, and creativity. Instead of philosophizing in a rarefied space of pure ideas, Nietzsche explores the relationship between knowledge and our messy, fleshy lives.

Like many feminist standpoint theorists have argued, Nietzsche recognized that perspective plays an important role in how we value and re-value the world. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche calls the traditional attitude of philosophy—disinterested contemplation—a nonsensical absurdity. He likens it to “an eye that is turned in no particular direction.” For Nietzsche, our affects, drives, desires, and instincts are fundamental to how we perceive and think about the world. He denies the possibility of a universal or purely objective viewpoint, and instead holds that perception and knowledge are always perspectival. Every perspective, moreover, is one of countless possibilities.

Nietzsche doesn’t mourn the impossibility of an objective standpoint to understand the world. He says we should be grateful that our accustomed perspectives can change. All knowledge is interpretation, and interpretations are creations that can be continually revised. Moreover, Nietzsche considers being open to revision a strength, rather than a flaw. Instead of trying to arrive at one stable, unified, and unchanging vantage point, we should embrace a variety of perspectives. This ability to shift perspective is necessary for life. In Dawn, Nietzsche explains that minds require the ability to change, just as a snake must be able to shed its skin. The snake that cannot shed its skin will die. Life demands growth and transformation. 

Shifting one’s perspective is not so simple. It is a practice that requires navigating the unfamiliar, a task that can involve a radical transformation of oneself. It involves, as Rebecca Solnit describes, “extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory” and “becoming someone else.” Changing how we see requires openness to being undone and reassembled—a process of self-overcoming (Selbstüberwindung) to use Nietzsche’s language. For Nietzsche, each person is an on-going project, a continual process of becoming, rather than a static being.

Nietzsche’s perspectivism rejects the modern concept of subjectivity. For Descartes, the subject is a thinking thing (res cogitans) that stands apart from the world and reasons from their subjective experiences with the goal of achieving objectivity. For Kant, the self is an “I” that serves as a necessary reference point for experience to be coherent and unified. In both cases, the subject serves as the center of experience and knowledge. I think. I will. I act. Nietzsche thinks this concept of the self is a fiction derived from grammar. Sentence structure requires attaching the verb to a subject, so we assume that every action needs an underlying subject. Nietzsche calls this assumption “a seduction of language.” In reality, only the action matters. The self is not a singular “I,” as the concept of the modern subject suggests, but a multiplicity of perspectives, drives, desires, and instincts without any center. The self is not an entity to be taken for granted, but a creative act that expresses flexibility and adaptation. Nietzsche’s concept of the self allows more radical shifts of perspective and self-transformation than the modern subject.

While shifting one’s perspective may sound like a liberatory practice that involves an openness to other people’s ways of seeing, it can also be an act of domination. In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche describes all events in life as asserting power over others, and then frames self-overcoming as a mode of subduing others and becoming master. As Ofelia Schutte has explained, Nietzsche’s philosophy is both creative and destructive. He critiques modern nihilism to assert life-affirming values and, at the same time, justifies cruelty and violence in the name of what he deems to be a superior culture. As Schutte describes, Nietzsche values life in its totality as a process but fails to see the value of individuals’ lives. For these reasons, his concept of shifting perspective does not necessarily involve care or consideration for others, which is evident in his misogynistic, anti-Semitic, and anti-Black diatribes. His perspectivism thus falls into the plight that Marilyn Frye calls ‘arrogant perception.’ For Frye, arrogant perception is a worldview that organizes everything in a hierarchy according to patriarchal, Anglo/White interests and subordinates any other perspective. It is a self-centered and unyielding perspective that strives to maintain its power and centrality. Insofar as it is a rigid, exclusive, and hierarchical framework, arrogant perception demonstrates an inability to shift perspective. Here we see the limits of Nietzsche’s philosophy of perspective.

We need a more relational concept of perspective than what Nietzsche offers. Frye contrasts arrogant perception with loving perception, which cares for and honors the other. Loving perception is a broader framework for understanding the world and relating to others. It allows someone to set aside their own thoughts, feelings, and interests to move between many views. In lieu of what may be called Nietzsche’s arrogant perspectivism, what would a loving perspectivism look like? Here Latinx decolonial theorists Maria Lugones and Gloria Anzaldúa offer a more relational and transformative concept of perspective.

Like Nietzsche, Anzaldúa and Lugones challenge traditional Western philosophy by questioning the modern concept of the human subject and expanding the horizons of knowledge in new directions. A growing body of scholarship brings Nietzsche and continental philosophy into conversation with Anzaldúa and Lugones, such as C. Heike Schotten’s 2006 article “Revolutionary Futures”, Mariana Ortega’s 2016 book In-Between, Natalie Cisneros’s 2019 chapter “Embodied Genealogies”, and Nancy Tuana and Charles Scott’s 2020 book Beyond Philosophy. Despite having very different cultural and historical perspectives, there are multiple sites where these philosophers’ ideas meet. The different perspectives of Anzaldúa, Lugones, and Nietzsche invite us to examine perspective itself. While Nietzsche’s philosophy provides rich resources for thinking about the meaning of perspective, Anzaldúa and Lugones offer a more promising articulation of its possibilities.

Lugones’ playful world-travelling expands the concept of loving perception by examining how we can shift perspectives across different cultures and ethnic or racial identities. World-travelling is no small shift. This term emphasizes a radical change in perspective that changes one’s life and transforms one’s identity. For Lugones, a world is “a construction of life.” There are many different worlds—large or small, mainstream or idiosyncratic, dominant or non-dominant. Individuals can inhabit multiple worlds at the same time, as well as privilege some over others. World-travelling changes one’s construction of life by allowing new ways of being and, at times, foreclosing previous ones. We inhabit worlds differently. There are worlds where we feel a sense of belonging and ease—“my world.” There are worlds where we are outsiders and feel the stress of not belonging or being at ease. Lugones describes herself—an Argentine-born lesbian feminist academic in the U.S.—as being playful in worlds where she is at ease, and not playful in worlds where she is an outsider. Entering a new world transforms who we are as a person. More importantly in this example of playfulness, we can be two incompatible selves. Since we can inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously, we are not singular individuals. As Lugones declares, “I am a plurality of selves.”

Playfulness does more than reveal the plural self. For Lugones, playfulness is the way we lovingly travel across worlds and create new relations with others. She describes playfulness as a way of engaging with others that is ambiguous and open to surprise. Playfulness is not rule-based or concerned with competition or competence. It is a way of actively and creatively becoming a part of a new world and discovering its possibilities with others. For this reason, playful world-traveling must be loving rather than arrogant. Playfulness requires us to let go of ourselves and to be open to new constructions of ourselves. Arrogance asserts oneself over and against others and holds on to accustomed rules and norms. Settler-colonialism is the paradigmatic expression of arrogant world-travelling because it treats other worlds as something to be conquered and reformed in its image. Unlike Nietzsche who sees perspective-shifting and self-transformation as modes of dominating others, Lugones considers playful world-traveling to require a loving openness to others.

Like Nietzsche, Lugones sees the self as multiplicitous, flexible, and creative—able to shift between perspectives and worlds and, in doing so, to become a new person. Unlike Nietzsche, Lugones thinks about these ideas in terms of people who are marginalized. She explains that outsiders learn to be flexible because it is demanded of them. Anzaldúa explains this issue in her articulation of la facultad, a shift in perception that outsiders experience. She describes la facultad as a heightened awareness that allows someone to sense what is below the surface, especially what is dangerous to their existence—for example, feeling a hostile look behind them or reading threatening cues from someone’s body language. La facultad is not simply an intensification of one’s everyday perspective. Anzaldúa describes it as a break that allows new sight. People who travel between worlds develop this flexibility of perspective as a survival tactic.

Yet flexibility and multiplicity can be intentional and liberatory as well. The concept of a plural self can be an act of resistance, particularly when someone is in an oppressive world that limits who they can be. In Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, Lugones explains that the “task of remembering one’s many selves is a difficult liberatory task.” It is a refusal to be erased. The multiplicity of the self is important to Latinx philosophy and decolonial projects. Elena Ruiz’s “Feminist Border Thought” explains that one of the most enduring impacts of colonialism on Latin America has been its devastation of indigenous social contexts and concepts of self in order to forcibly transplant European gendered, ethnic, and racial categories. Ruiz describes this effect as a loss of words or frameworks by which Latinx people can articulate and make sense of their complex and conflicting identities. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa describes the new mestiza as an identity formed between clashing, incompatible points of view (indigenous, Mexican, and Anglo). Since culture forms our perception of reality, la mestiza’s opposing frames of reference create a cultural collision (un choque). Anzaldúa describes this sense of multiple selves and multiple realities as “psychic restlessness.”

Anzaldúa also finds profound beauty in her inner conflict. She brings together her plural identities— “Chicana, tejana, working-class, dyke-feminist poet, writer-theorist”—through amasamiento, an act of kneading. Her writing is richly layered and expressive because she interweaves multiple languages (English, Spanish, Aztec, Nahuatl, and Toltec) and cultural perspectives. For Anzaldúa, mestiza consciousness allows a more fluid way of thinking that does not uphold rigid boundaries or attempt to reason to one convergent point like Western rationality. Mestiza consciousness allows contradictions, ambiguities, and divergent points of view. Moreover, having divergent points of view allows rich, creative, transformative modes of thinking and being. She writes, “Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create. It is like a cactus needle embedded in the flesh.” The inner conflict and restlessness of her plural self are the impetus to create.  

Through Anzaldúa and Lugones, we find a more nuanced concept of how we form our perspectives. Like Nietzsche, they describe perception and knowledge as perspectival. However, they emphasize the role perspective-shifting plays in building relationships with others. With Anzaldúa and Lugones, the mobility of perspective describes an openness to not simply other points of views but also other individuals. Moreover, their experiences travelling between worlds and interweaving conflicting identities demonstrate the costs and stakes of shifting perspective, transforming oneself, and being a multiplicity. In these ways, Anzaldúa and Lugones help us to shift philosophical discourse away from a narrow perspective that excludes and denigrates others towards a liberatory project. 

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott.

Rebecca A. Longtin

Rebecca A. Longtin is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at SUNY New Paltz. Her research brings together phenomenology, existentialism, aesthetics, feminist philosophy, and critical philosophy of race to examine the complexities, ambiguities, and multiplicities of human experience. She is working on a book about the phenomenology and ethics of cultivating one’s perspective in relation to others.