Order and Disorder
Frequently questions are raised concerning the meaning of order and disorder in my analysis. The reality of order is not my discovery. I am speaking of the order in reality discovered by mankind as far back as we have any written records, and now even further back as we become familiar with the symbols in monuments discovered by archaeologists as far back as the Paleolithicum. By order is meant the structure of reality as experienced as well as the attunement of man to an order that is not of his making—i.e., the cosmic order. These insights into the structure and into the problem of adjustment or attunement, as I said, are present in literary documents as far back as the Egyptian third millennium B.C. To the same Egyptian millennium B.C. go back the literary expressions of experience of disorder, as in the development of radical skepticism regarding cosmic order when the daily experience was that of murderous disorder in the streets—as for instance in the famous Dialogue of a Suicide with His Soul, which I analyzed in my study on “Immortality: Experience and Symbol.”1 In such experiences of social and cosmic disorder, order is reduced to one’s own person and is perhaps not to be found even there; these experiences produce certain extreme states of alienation in which death may appear as the release from a prison or as convalescence from the mortal disease of life. Practically nothing has changed in these fundamental symbolisms of alienation since the third millennium B.C.
The categorization of these experiences of disorder, however, occurred fairly late. The concept of alienation (allotriosis), so far as I know, was first created by the Stoics and later extensively used by Plotinus. In the Stoic psychopathology, allotriosis means a state of withdrawal from one’s own self as constituted by the tension toward the divine ground of existence. Since the divine ground of existence is in Classic as well as in Stoic philosophy the logos or the source of order in this world, the withdrawal from one’s self as constituted by this ordering force is a withdrawal from reason in existence. The result will then be the use of reason, which man has after all, for the purpose of justifying existence in the state of alienation. This far even the Stoics had advanced the psychopathology of alienation.
The Stoic categories can be applied to modern ideological phenomena in which the state of alienation, rather than the state of existence in tension toward the divine ground, is used as the experiential basis for an understanding of reality. The systems of thinkers like Hegel are systematizations of a state of alienation; inevitably they must arrive at the death of God, not because God is dead but because divine reason has been rejected in the egophanic revolt. One cannot revolt against God without revolting against reason and vice versa. These interpretations of reality on the basis of a deformed existence that is no longer open to the reality of the ground, and has therefore to remove the experience of the ground from any consideration of reality, result in typical phenomena.
The most important such phenomenon is of course the construction of systems. The system is a distinctly modern phenomenon, though its modernity has been obscured by a climate of opinion in which the system as the mode of philosophical thinking is taken so thoroughly for granted that the reality of non-systematic philosophizing has been eclipsed. One speaks flatly, without thinking, of a Platonic or Aristotelian system, or of a Thomasic system, in spite of the fact that these thinkers would have raised their hands in horror at the idea that their empirical exploration of reality could ever result in a system. If anything was ever clear to a thinker like Plato, who knew to distinguish between the experiences of being and of not-being and acknowledged them both, it was that for better or for worse reality was not a system. If therefore one constructs a system, inevitably one has to falsify reality. One of the important objects of inquiry concerning modern politics would have to be an inventory of the phenomena of systematic falsification, because they are a highly important factor of disorder in the contemporary situation. But the resistance to such inquiries is of course formidable, because precisely the persons who should engage in them are, as a group, the ones who would first have to discard their own systematic thought as a falsification of reality. And that, of course, they are not inclined to do. Still, the pressure of expanding historical knowledge, both with regard to political history and to the history of intellectual and spiritual phenomena, is increasing so strongly that one can reasonably predict (barring major social catastrophes that would bring a totalitarian systematizing sect to power) that the days of the systematizers and their disordering falsification of reality are numbered.
1. First published in 1967; reprinted in CW, vol. 12, chap. 3.