I heartily agree with what you are saying… but I wonder if we can really remove ourselves from “disordered realms”? (And I hope I’m right in understanding that to be part of your point.)
It seems we encounter them everywhere, perhaps especially when we retreat from the ‘artificial’ orders of nature and culture – that is, that most complex of assemblages, the home. Eastern thought reminds us beautifully that the primary order is not the evolution of ‘thought,’ it’s the spontaneous evolution of another order from (apparently) ‘disordered’ regimes. We read this in Western thought as the converse, or the genealogy of morality – how we produce peace from death, creativity from destructive, even ecstasy and the sublime from the depths of alienation and misery… how we get “a place like home” from the raw material of the ‘primitive’ state and it’s territorial war machines.
I don’t think we ought to escape this conclusion. Some of the more radical interpretations of Zen converge here as well, and I’m thinking specifically of the notions of the possibility of a practical or experiential wisdom which is not founded on the basis of the ordering of apparent reality. The real, after all, is change, not a hard kernel of necessity. The apparent stability of flux is not only arbitrary, but even imaginary – it is not merely that we evolved to have a certain kind of perceptual structure, but also that the world and the subject exist separately only after being distinguished (introduced by reason and language.)
So by introducing equivocation into the heart of being we’ve arrived also at the other end, Continental phenomenology, which would argue passionately that ordering is not primary, but introduced by the perceptual apparatus. In other words, it’s not so much that the subject imagines or creates the world around him, but it is true that the subject makes a world possible. The idea here is that perception is behavior, and so when we’re talking about ‘paper tigers’ – we have to remember they can roar! And as far as betraying principles, the question would be about ethical virtue, not ‘effected’ behavior but affective action… which does not require a move from a disordered realm to an ordered one! This is the question of the mystical, the invisible, that ordering which exists despite the fact we cannot perceive it: all faith and truth rest on this sort of equivocal basis.
So being authentically: doesn’t this mean to be in a univocal sense? In literature, it would be to speak the truth boldly in your own simple way, the truth of your experience. In ethics as in war, authenticity is to risk your life for the other. In politics, it is speaking truth to power. In science, it is to ‘reharmonize’ discourses, to realize them as organic, or if possible, even machinic disciplines: what is physics but tracing paths and mapping waves? What is mathematics but the logic of distinction? In each case, we are confronted with the event, which doesn’t fit into the situation – it threatens the state of affairs with collapse, with the rupture of its symbolic coordinates. Such is the power of the event, and so the danger of betraying it: the ethical injunction to virtue, in this light, would mean: become equal to the events of your life.
Similarly, we have to meet interpretation halfway. “The art of listening is almost as important as the art of saying the right thing.” History is not just about one system being replaced by another: history is paths and ruptures, waves and milieus… the question is not really about fighting history, after all – it’s about becoming equal to history, learning to think historically. Only then, once we’ve engaged as subjects, and become faithful to an interpretation, are we ever in a position to determine which side we ought to fight for.