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mk  ·  4939 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Vaclav Havel's Critique of the West
I have to disagree with what I understand to be the issue Havel was raising. Personally, I think it's that we want to define good and evil in a way that sits right with us, that has gotten us into this mess. IMHO, we need to embrace relativism, and understand that relativism is not the same as reductionism, or deconstructionism. Relativism is not loss of truth. Truth is real, but it is contextual.

Notions of good and evil, are individual solutions, and are attempts to wrap context around everything. Doing so, we remain ourselves, but we are not accepting each other, and are only agreeing not to raise the point that we are certain the other is wrong. In fact, we can both be wrong, and we can both be right. It is our context that has built our worldview and solutions, and they are worth understanding.

IMHO it's not productive to agree to disagree, or to call off the search. We need to understand why we must disagree, and why we need each other in order to search better. An individual cannot be whole unless he/she accepts that everyone else is whole. And to do this, we have to realize that we have no advantage of perception. It's not arrogant when we honestly look to each other to solve the puzzle of the world. It's arrogant to think that anyone can solve it using a context that is consistent with his/her worldview.