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solzynitsin. In 1978, the audience in Cambridge Massachusetts, at Harvard
University’s commencement speech, was being addressed ...
Submitted by coboyl07 on April 23, 2007
Category: History Other
Words: 1475 | Pages: 6
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In 1978, the audience in Cambridge Massachusetts, at Harvard University’s commencement speech, was being addressed by an esteemed writer and thinker named Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Coming from Communist Russia, many people were expecting a speech praising Western values, ideals, and accomplishments. However, what Sol came to say, was anything but a praise of Western Civilization. He proceeded to warn Westerners about the demise of our society that stemmed from our diluted ideals and virtues that we have come to rely on so greatly. In his speech entitled “A World Split Apart,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn relates many downfalls of the “common society” to many topics we are discussing this semester in the Development of Western Civilization.
One of the topics that had particular relevance to Solzhenitsyn’s speech was the idea of existentialism. Existentialist’s were advocates of free will and said that we were the product of our choices. We are responsible for our individual choices, and the product of those choices, the existentialist’s preached, makes up the complete human person. Soren Kierkegaard, a very influential existentialist also has relevance to Solzhenitsyn’s speech. The individual is subject to an enormous burden of responsibility, for upon his or her existential choices hangs his or her eternal salvation or damnation. “Kierkegaard's central problem was how to become a Christian in Christendom. The task was most difficult for the well-educated, since prevailing educational and cultural institutions tended to produce stereotyped members of "the crowd" rather than to allow individuals to discover their own unique identities” (www.plato.stanford.edu). Sol talks about this a great deal in his speech as he is a huge advocate for individual advancement versus the “crowd” mentality. In Eastern Europe, mostly in Communist Russia, social identities were fluid, meaning everyone was considered the same, but in the West there is a huge opportunity for...
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