Quotes About Relativism

Thus, relativism removes one of our most powerful motives to study the views of the other-the idea that the other might be right and we might be wrong.

Subjectivism maintains that there are no objective moral truths.

Now that sense of intellectual urgency has dissipated. Tolerance, relativism, the postmodern refusal to commit, the cultural triumph of uncertainty – all these rule out a repeat of the pyrotechnics in H3. Perhaps, too, there is currently so much specialization, and so many movements and fissures within higher education, that the important questions have been lost.

Yet only the atrocities of the conquered are referred to as criminal acts; those of the conqueror are justified as necessary, heroic, and even worse, as the fulfillment of God's will.

Questions of absolute good and evil are much better not opened to public debate these days, when so few people are sure of their absolutes

There is no such thing as pure relativism. Anything is seen from the eye of the viewer, from one of many angles or frames of reference. The fact that truth may be relative should not lead to the judgment that all values are on the same scale.

when they identify relativism, the belief that there is no absolute truth to guide human behavior, as one of the evils of our times; but you won't find absolute truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, ideologies, sets of rules, or stories.

The Catholic and other churches are actually correct when they identify relativism, the belief that there is no absolute truth to guide human behavior, as one of the evils of our times; but you won't find absolute truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, ideologies, sets of rules, or stories. What do all of these have in common? They are made up of thought.

Herkes kendi cennetini ba?kas?n?n cehennemine koyar.

It is not difference that dominates the world, but the obliteration of difference by mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of perpetual difference to be an illusion.

Men tend to be more orthodox in belief. Their concern for the rules keeps a congregation from drifting toward mushy moral relativism.

The problem, it is claimed, with grand narratives is that they privilege one perspective over another; the alternative is a relativism which holds that all perspectives are equally valid.

Cultural relativism destroys both one's own and the good.

A value-creating man is a plausible substitute for a good man, and some such substitute becomes practically inevitable in pop relativism, since very few persons can think of themselves as just nothing. The respectable and accessible nobility of man is to be found not in the quest for or discovery of the good life, but in creating ones own life-style, of which there is not just one but many possible, none comparable to another.

Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice.

Suppose we concede that if I had been born of Muslim parents in Morocco rather than Christian parents in Michigan, my beliefs would be quite different. [But] the same goes for the pluralist...If the pluralist had been born in [Morocco] he probably wouldn't be a pluralist. Does it follow that...his pluralist beliefs are produced in him by an unreliable belief-producing process?

Jerry Fodor, a fierce critic of pragmatist approaches to mind and language, puts this sort of criticism in a nutshell when he says: "First the pragmatist theory of concepts, then the theory theory of concepts, then holism, then relativism. So it goes" (Fodor 1994, p. 111).

The hero can never be a relativist.

The absolutist One True Faith came out of the Dark Ages and should get sent back there. We live with varying perspectives, especially if we have to deal with people of varying cultures.

The chief fault of most academic theoreticians of postmodernism, as Gross and Levitt emphasize, lies in never applying perspectivism to themselves — i.e., in holding an oxymoronic position that always implies "everything is relative except my own dogmas." I do not make that error habitually, and I like to think I never make it at all. (I sure hope not, but as a Cosmic Schmuck, I assume I have slipped into it on occasion.*)

But in considering the above experiments, I feel we need to accept some sort of post-modernism, or at least some of the "neurological relativism" I preach in all my books. The instrument that measures all other instruments — the human nervous system — has its own laws, and one of them involves always seeing the results one wants to see until and unless something really startles the brain enough to reframe its experiences.

If Nietzsche's existential relativism be accepted, then there will always be true things that do not fit any existing reality-tunnel, just as in mathematics Godel demonstrated that there will always be true theorems not deducible from any set of axioms. (See Chapter Two.)

To review: Each individual has a neurological system, or game, different from other members of the same society. In accord with Einstein's physical relativism, and anthropology's cultural relativism, we call this neurological relativism.

Muslims stand by their religion entirely. It is a sort of religious absolutism. While Europeans have stopped defending the values of their civilization. They confuse tolerance with relativism.