ABSTRACT
Relativism has shaped the intellectual ethos of our times. As early as in the 1950s it had found its way into the more popular debates on the scope and requirements of morality when ‘absolute relativity’ was seen as ‘hip’, and traditional views of moral duty were deemed to be ‘square’. Norman Mailer in 1957 wrote:
Character…enters then into an absolute relativity where there are no truths other than the isolated truths of what each observer feels at each instant of his existence… What is consequent therefore is the divorce of man from his values, the liberation of the self from the Super-ego of society. The only Hip morality…is to do what one feels whenever and wherever it is possible, and-this is how the war of the Hip and the Square begins-to engage in one primal battle: to open the limits of the possible for oneself, for oneself alone because that is one’s need.
