I’ve encountered at least four pluralisms in the past week.

The first is an old-school postmodern pluralism. In this kind of pluralism each person has their own truth, and they don’t have to reconcile it with anyone else’s. They might not even be able to.

The second pluralism is a typological one. In this kind of pluralism there is a schema of types, each with its own valid way of understanding the world. But behind this pluralism is an implicit monism. A typological pluralist will be quite comfortable with a plurality of truths within their system, but they are often averse to viewing their own typology as a product of one of a plurality of truths. The typology itself is privileged as somehow transcending the pluralistic order. It functions almost like a metaphysical foundation for the typology. Personality typologies like Jungian / Myers-Briggs and Enneagram are psychological examples of this form of pluralism, and progressivist identitarianism is a political example.

The third pluralism is one that seeks to situate itself as an equal in a plurality of views. It aspires to view the world as constituted of I-points, each with its own truth, all of which are the center of an otherwise centerless reality. It differs from the first pluralism in that it wishes to understand other truths besides its own. It differs from the second pluralism in that it is aware that its own way of understanding other truths (for example, in a typology) is a feature of its own truth that does not transcend itself, but rather is intrinsic to it. Consequently, a belief that one’s typology has a metaphysical reality that transcends one’s own truth and self is a covert self-privileging. A well-meaning pluralist can renounce one’s identity all day, but if one does this while exalting one’s identity schema and theory, this is only a trick for exalting one’s own truth over that of others. The third pluralism sees this clearly, where the second pluralist remains trapped in unconscious meta-absolutism.

The fourth pluralist builds on the third pluralism and tries to learn from other perspectives in order to create a less naive version of what the second pluralism has, namely, a way to conceptualize pluralistic difference. The fourth pluralist attempts to maintain awareness that however persuasive their schematic conceptualization might be to them, it remains their truth, and that this truth can and should continue evolve with learning. But it tries to accommodate more and more difference, which includes more and more divergent accounts of difference. This fourth kind of pluralist, for example won’t argue over which personality typology is more true, but instead tries to understand what each typology includes and excludes, and what this pattern of inclusions and exclusions allows it to do. It doesn’t deny the relative reality of social or political identities, but it looks at what this way of viewing social and political situations reveals and conceals. And it does all these things tentatively.