The Standpoint of the Oppressed Doesn't Lead to Truth

If you care about the oppressed, you should care about data, science, and rational thought, not misguided "radical" epistemologies.

Photo by Pratik Chitte on Unsplash

Slavoj Žižek, one of the world’s most influential philosophers, writes:

“There is nothing “relativist” in the fact that human history is always told from a certain standpoint, sustained by certain ideological interests. The difficult thing is to show how some of these interested standpoints are not ultimately all equally true—some are more “truthful” than others. For example, if one tells the story of Nazi Germany from the standpoint of the suffering of those oppressed by it, i.e., if we are led in our telling by an interest in universal human emancipation, this is not just a matter of a different subjective standpoint: such a retelling of history is also immanently “more true,” since it describes more adequately the dynamics of the social totality that gave birth to Nazism.”

This is a concise summary of a popular view among many “radical” (i.e., very left-wing) philosophers and social theorists.

Although the view comes in different forms, the basic idea goes something like this: All claims to knowledge are shaped by specific standpoints and interests, but some standpoints and interests—those of the oppressed, or those guided by interests in universal human emancipation—nevertheless provide unique access to the truth about society.

In this essay, I’ll first describe some of the reasoning behind this view and then explain why I think it’s completely wrong-headed and counter-productive.

From a “naïve” to a “sophisticated” view of epistemology

The view in question typically begins by replacing an allegedly naive perspective on knowledge with an allegedly more sophisticated one. According to the “naïve” view, there is such a thing as knowledge that is not standpoint-relative and not “sustained by ideological interests.” Although it’s rarely clear what this is supposed to mean, the view might be summarised like this:

The naïve view: Objective reality exists. Some methods reveal the nature of this reality, such as scientific investigation and rational thought. These methods are accessible to all rational agents regardless of their social position (class, race, sex, sexuality, etc.), values, or interests. By applying these methods to publicly available data, we can rationally resolve disagreements, overcome our subjective and myopic perspectives, and develop more accurate representations of objective reality.

For various reasons, the naïve view has taken a battering over the past century within the humanities and parts of the social sciences, especially when it comes to knowledge about human behaviour, society, and history.

Žižek summarises one prominent line of argument:

“the correct stance is not simply to stick to factual truth: in some sense, there ARE “alternate facts”… “Data” constitutes a vast and impenetrable domain, and we always approach it from what hermeneutics calls a certain horizon of understanding, privileging some data and omitting others. All our histories are precisely that—stories, combinations of (selected) data into consistent narratives, not photographic reproductions of reality.”

According to this view, there are many ways to carve up and interpret reality. You can’t simply “believe the facts”. There are too many facts, and too many ways of interpreting and connecting them through systems of concepts and explanatory frameworks (“stories”).

So, we must always be selective, both in which facts we attend to and in how we make sense of them. Because reality doesn’t come pre-packaged with labels telling us which facts matter and how they fit together, these selections will inevitably be guided by our “values” or “interests” or “standpoints”, which give rise to distinct perspectives (“paradigms”, “discourses”, “regimes of truth”, “language games”, “horizons of understanding”, “standpoints”, “ideologies”, etc.).

This leads to the allegedly more “sophisticated view”:

The sophisticated view: There is no single, “objective” perspective on reality. There are many possible perspectives, all of which involve different decisions about which aspects of reality to focus on and how to categorise, interpret, and explain them. Because values or interests inevitably shape the attentive and interpretive choices underlying such perspectives, the idea of “value-free” knowledge is, at best, incoherent and, at worst, a sinister way of concealing the actual values and interests at play in specific cases.

The spectre of relativism

The problem is that the sophisticated view invites an obvious objection.

If reality admits of many possible perspectives, and there is no way of adjudicating between them by appeal to disinterested, value-free methods, or by reference to "the facts," wouldn't that imply that all these perspectives are equally good, legitimate, accurate, factual, and so on? And wouldn’t that “relativist” view be bad?

Many influential philosophers and social theorists (e.g., Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard) have been willing to bite the bullet here, albeit with enough obfuscation to provide plausible deniability whenever this implication of their views is pointed out.

Nevertheless, it’s not a very attractive bullet to bite. For one thing, relativism seems to be clearly wrong. For another, it seems to be self-undermining. (Is the perspective that all perspectives are equally accurate itself just one perspective among others? Etc.).

But even worse, wouldn’t relativism imply that a centrist, liberal, or even right-wing political perspective on society is not objectively worse than a left-wing one? For most proponents of the sophisticated view, it is this implication that would be truly intolerable.

To avoid this worry, many radical theorists propose variations on the following solution: Yes, all perspectives are standpoint-relative, but some standpoint-relative perspectives are less standpoint-relative than others.

The good standpoints are those “led by an interest in universal human emancipation”, which, in practice, means taking the side and—at least when they are enlightened by left-wing social theory—standpoint of those oppressed by society’s power structures.

As Žižek writes,

“All “subjective interests” are not the same—not only because some are ethically preferable to others, but because “subjective interests” do not stand outside social totality; they are themselves moments of social totality, formed by active (or passive) participants in social processes. “That’s why there is no “neutral” or “objective” report on the Middle East war or on the Russian aggression against Ukraine: one can tell the truth about it only from the engaged standpoint of a victim.”

Although this is very unclear, the basic idea is that only the engaged standpoint of the oppressed reveals the power relations that truly structure society and social conflicts (“social totality”). This idea gets formulated and justified in different ways in the academic literature.

For example, standpoint theory typically asserts that you must actually be oppressed to adopt the relevant standpoint, even if oppressed groups must engage in a lot of “critical reflection” and “consciousness-raising” to discover the knowledge that their oppression makes available to them. There are various arguments for this idea, including that the oppressed are uniquely exposed to their oppression and have a greater incentive to understand it accurately, unlike oppressor groups, who are not motivated to care about or attend to the downsides of a status quo from which they benefit.

In contrast, “critical theory” was historically associated with the idea that privileged intellectuals could achieve the “true” standpoint as long as they held the appropriate left-wing values and were steeped in the right “critical” social theory (mostly Marxism and psychoanalysis).

Here, what matters is not being oppressed. In fact, the oppressed were often depicted as suffering from “false consciousness” in early critical theory. What matters is being a social theorist guided by emancipatory values that motivate you to form a “dynamic unity with the oppressed class”, unlike “positivist” social theorists—those who endorse the naïve view of knowledge—who allegedly treat social arrangements as “natural” and, hence, fixed.

These and many more variations on the core idea won’t matter much for my purposes, because I think anything that remotely resembles this viewpoint—anything that could even be confused for it on a foggy night—is completely mistaken.

I also think it’s counterproductive. If you actually care about the oppressed, you should oppose this view of knowledge.

There are many things to say here, but I’ll restrict myself to two basic points: