The Need for Transcendence in the Post-Modern World
By Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic.
Excerpt from His Excellency’s acceptance speech on receiving the Philadelphia Liberty Medal on July 4th, 1994, in front of Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
“It logically follows that, in today’s multicultural world, the truly reliable path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must start from what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than political opinions, convictions, antipathies, or sympathies. It must be rooted in self-transcendence: transcendence as a hand reaching out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe; transcendence is a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not, with what we do not understand, with what seems distant from us in time and space, but with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world; transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction.
The Declaration of Independence, adopted 218 years ago in this building, states that the Creator gave man the right to liberty. It seems that man can realize that liberty only if he does not forget the One who endowed him with it.”
Czech President Vaclav Havel July 4th, 1994
The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice
“The Philadelphia Liberty Medal”