But the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice; that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction. But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. (Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, Commencement Address At Harvard, June 8, 1978)

a) This is, of course, exactly the view that George Bush continually touts in regard to Iraq and to the Arab world generally.

b) Solzhenitsyn maintains that the problem with such a view lies in the fact that it “is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds.” Where and when is “the essence of other worlds”? How does one get there? What is to be done there?

c) The great difficulty faced by Solzhenitsyn is that he wants to describe not what is seen, but how we see. Ie, he wants to describe exactly what is not seen, what is behind our seeing.

d) More, the problem of our seeing, something that would seem to be a matter only of optics or perhaps of epistemology, is in fact a matter of ontology. Our seeing is shaped by exactly that logic of fundamental split whose roots go down to essence or origin: “the persisting blindness of superiority” depends upon a fundamental split between what is above and what is below. It is this “split” of the two (world from essence, how we see from the possibilities (plural) of seeing) which underlies our delusions that there is nothing essential to be considered in our lives, that what we see may be accepted without consideration of how we see, that how we see is not open to a range of possibilities.

The World Split Apart segments continue here. Further consideration in A World Split Apart of the above and the below is to be found here.