THE CENTRE CAN HOLD
Turning and turning in a widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction,whilst the worst
Are full of a passionate intensity.
W.B.Yates
The search for truth seems to be at an end. Post-modernism is the culmination of a movement that started with a divide in the road of intellectual history after Kant and now there seems to be no way forward. Anti-realism in religion and morality merely confirms the radical relativity of different truth perspectives and the younger generation, as well as those who are older, may come to despair at the lack of meaning and value in the world in which we live.
The third part of this book will go back in order to go forward, to recapture the alternative path that lay open after Kant. This is the path of Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Vaclav Havel. It is also the path of Rabbi Reb Menahem Mendl of Kotzk (the Kotzker) in Poland, possibly of the Sufi mystics and a minority of others. It is an unfashionable understanding of truth, a path that few espouse, but a path that still lies open and which can provide a way forward, provided the necessary conditions that it entails are accepted.
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