Oskar Looritsa perspektivism
Oskar Loorits and perspectivism

Summary/Abstract: Perspectivism is a philosophical category that has recently been transposed to cultural anthropology. It is based on a Nietzschean idea that there is no pure reason or absolute spirituality but „only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’” (On the Genealogy of Morality, III, 12). Viveiros de Castro has identified perspectivism as a multinaturalism, opposing this concept to the dominant form of multiculturalism: the core of multinaturalism is the idea that „a perspective is not a representation” and „every existent can be thought of as thinking” (Cannibal Metaphysics). Therefore a perspectivist way of thinking necessarily presupposes a certain ontological attitude that Philippe Descola has called the animist mode of identification, which does not discriminate between human and nonhuman beings and endows every being with a soul (Beyond Nature and Culture). Estonian ethnologist Oskar Loorits (1900–1961) had a keen interest in Livonian mythology. In 1926–1928 he published three volumes of Livonian Folk Religion that may be considered one of his major works. Loorits seems to pay remarkable attention to the perspectivist aspect of Livonian animist religion, without ever using the term ‘perspectivism’, though. In his essays on Estonian history and the Finno-Ugric worldview he suggests that strangers were generally not treated as opponents or aliens, but merely as guests. This implies a heteronomous ethics that is oriented towards the other and not towards oneself, resembling in some aspects the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. The heteronomous ethical program of Loorits is evidently connected to his animist perspectivism that lays the basis for his high evaluation of the traditional cosmology.

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