The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
— Elliot W. Eisner
Revolutionary Multiple Perspectives quotations
Flexibility comes from having multiple choices; wisdom comes from having multiple perspectives.
I've always been fascinated by Picasso and how he would look at a single image through multiple perspectives and from separate moments in time. He would look at a woman's face and he would see almost a three-dimensional look even though it was a flat canvas. I thought, well why couldn't we do the same thing with a football play?
I can't promise my child a life without bias - we're all biased - but I promise to bias my child with multiple perspectives.
The sense of perspective that interaction with multiple cultures gives you I find to be extremely valuable, because it allows you to see the structure of a country with greater clarity, and gives you a sense of mental independence.
... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?
We frequently hear how essential it is for someone to think "outside the box," but what actually determines one's facility for doing so? In other words, what skills make someone a creative thinker? Typically, creative thinkers can view issues from multiple perspectives, define problems in several different ways, and anticipate likely obstacles. Someone's aptitude for these skills determines how well he or she will perform as a creative thinker.
I think, though, that perspective-awareness may follow from a kind of speaking that also came into my work more recently - the "assay" poems (some labeled that, some not) that engage an abstraction or object from multiple angles.
I can't promise my child a life without bias - we're all biased - but I promise to bias my child with multiple perspectives.