Buber's psychological recasting of Hasidic tales is crucial to my understanding of how important perspective is, and of how each of us sees the world from a different one. Buber tells the story of the Hasid who searches around the world for buried treasure, only to discover it in his own home. This was my first realization of how an individual's perspective determines her or his worldview. Things look different depending on where you are. This insight came to me in a more complex way in my adulthood through the teachings of feminism.
Feminists focus on the politics of perspective.
Where you stand determines both how you see things and how you are seen by others. Kept outside the circles of patriarchal power, women have a different view of the world, a view from the margins. This view gives them a particular way of seeing reality, but the reality they see is often ignored. Women of color, lesbians, Jewish and Muslim women, women with disabilities, and working class women nuanced the argument suggesting that there were multiple ways in which people stood at the margins, and therefore multiple vantage points from which to view the world, and multiple ways in which their insights were not taken seriously by those at the center. One of the goals of the feminist and other liberation movements of the seventies and eighties was to shift the balance so that marginal perspectives would at least receive public attention, and more significantly, the center itself would change and incorporate their vision as well.