“Polymorphous perversity“ is a Freudian psychoanalytic term to express the infant’s ability to gain sexual satisfaction by multiple means and orifices.

I interpret the phrase to mean that access to the world is polymorphous, taking on forms granted through many means. Polymorphousness is perverse because it doesn’t conform. My thesaurus offers these words as related to perversity: contrariness, awkwardness, recalcitrance, stubbornness, obstinacy, obduracy. When I was a student at UC Santa Cruz I took two classes with Norman O. Brown, the man who brought polymorphous perversity back into style. The first class focused on Faust, the second on Finnegans Wake. What I remember most about Brown was his openness to all streams of thought. If his early work progressed from the classics to Freudian theory, from there it shot forth in all directions. Here, perversity was a good thing; not only obdurate, or contrary, but self-propelling, self-satisfying, greedily entangled.

I’d like to start with Isaiah Berlin’s objective pluralism, and from there move on to Sean Carroll’s broadening of that term’s parameters. And then further still. The very important fact to consider in Berlin’s thought is that objective pluralism is not relativism. Things or conditions deemed relative share a relation. If we say everything everywhere is relative, that’s to say the self lacks firm ground on which to self-orient because all things merely relate to one another; the self at the center becomes vertiginous. Things are interrelated, conditioned by one another; fluid, relative.