If You Meet the Bob on the Road, Just Keep Going

If you've followed the argument thus far, the upshot is that "Spirit and the totality of the real"

are reciprocal concepts that correspond to one another. One cannot "have" the one without the other (Pieper).

As I was typing that sentence I had the flash of a half-baked proto-thought, one I hadn't really thunk before. That is, how exactly does one organize one's interior?

Further instant reflection suggests that this is essentially what we've been endeavoring to do lo these past three or four decades, and especially the last 1.5, i.e., since the dawn of the blog. Like Travis Bickle, we're just trying to get organizized.

I suppose it goes without saying that the less cluttered your head, the easier it is to organize the content. In other words, it helps to be stupid or ignorant. Then again, stupid people can be quite dangerous when, for example, they collectively grab hold of a simplistic principle to organize their otherwise chaotic lives. You know, the Terrible Simplifiers: BLM, Antifa, CNN, et al.

Not to re-belabor the point, but this is obviously the intrinsic appeal of ideology: whatever else an ideology is "about" -- e.g., race, class, gender, sexual deviation, etc. -- on a deeper level it is about the order of being. It is about trying to live in One Cosmos, even when the oneness is a delusion. Which I don't mind, so long as they don't force it on me and try to reduce my cosmos to theirs.

Recall Voegelin's zinger that The order of history is the history of order. True, but I hadn't thought of applying it to individual development: the order of psychological development is the development of psychological order. Which is always a process structure (as it so happens, one of the subjects of my doctoral dissertation.)

This subject is triggering so many associations that I don't know which way to turn: in other words, I'm once again faced with the challenge of ordering... my own mind. Same as any other day. The order of this post is a post about order.

If some bored scholar from the distant future were to undertake an exhumination my dead corpus, I believe one of the themes he'd discover is a search for Order; and if he were to dig a little deeper, he'd discover that the order of the search was, is, and always will be the search for order.

Rather than trying to explain what I mean, I think I'll hand the wheel of the bus over to Pieper, because he has an appealingly straightforward way of saying the same thing. Or maybe I just have an unappealingly obscure way of saying it. Either way, I'm going to cite a number of disparate passages that add up to the point I'm trying to make, but you'll have to do the math:

man is without environment and open to the world.... it is precisely this ability to have a world which is spirit!

"It belongs to the nature of existing things that they lie in the spirit's field of relations." Therefore,

"To have being" is synonymous with "lying within the spiritual soul's field of relations"; both expressions refer to one and the same state of affairs.

The potential danger here is that an improper understanding of what this means may reduce to postmodern solipsism -- to "perception is reality," AKA the whole "My Truth" industry. This is deicidedly not what we mean! What we are saying is that Truth is a process of its own discovery occurring in the space between Spirit and World. It's not just anything.

And now I'm reminded of Hayek's The Fatal Conceit, which I'm also rereading at the moment. He comes at it from a very different angle, but it nevertheless points to the same truth and the same world. First of all,

neither biological nor cultural evolution knows anything like "laws of evolution" or "inevitable laws of historical development" in the sense of laws governing necessary stages or phases through which the product of evolution must pass, and enabling the prediction of future developments.

You've probably heard the old wisecrack, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." Likewise, and for much the same reason, if you run into a man who claims to have discovered the Order, he hasn't. Rather, he's just an ideologue who wants to confine you to the prison of his own (dis)order. Folks like Marx and Comte -- who drew up the blueprints for the prisons of leftism and scientism, respectively -- are prime candidates for roadkill. Should you meet them on the autobahn of life.

"Spirit is the ability to grasp the totality of Being," but the task is never complete. And "the more extensive the power to entertain relations, the more multi-dimensioned the accompanying field of relations, the corresponding "world."

.... The more comprehensive the ability to relate to the world of objective being, the more deeply rooted the support for such expansions is in the interior of the subject (Pieper).

Thus,

To have a world, to be related to the totality of existing things, can be attributed only to a being that is grounded in itself, not a "what," but a "who," the self as "I," a person.

This person is finite, but grounded in the Infinite person, and this makes all the difference. For it explains how and why we are always on the way -- not to nowhere, but to somewhere and the samewho (the telos is a Person). The "in-between" -- of man and God --

corresponds to the realm of the genuinely human. It is genuinely human not to comprehend (the way God does) but also not to become rigid; not to confine oneself within the presumably fully illuminated world of everyday life; not to rest content with one's ignorance; not to lose that childishly fluid openness which is peculiar to the hoping person and only to him.

"Only God comprehends the world 'from a single point.'" This is the necessary condition for our being able to comprehend it from any point. But it is also why there can never be a closed system of philosophy, for "the claim to have discovered a cosmic formula is... by definition non-philosophy and pseudo-philosophy" (Pieper). So, if you meet that guy on the road, you know what to do.