“The great quests for truth in which the consciousness of the metaleptic story becomes differentiated - be they the priestly quest of Genesis with the prophetic quests in the background, or the Judaeo-Christian quest, or the Zoroastrian, the Hinduist and Buddhist, the Confucian and Taoist quests, or finally the noetic quests of the Hellenic philosophers - do not occur in a vacuum. They occur in social fields, constituted by older experiences of order and symbolizations of their truth, now experienced by the questioners to have fallen into disorder and decline. The quest for truth is a movement of resistance to the prevalent disorder; it is an effort to attune the concretely disordered existence again to the truth of the It-reality, an attempt to create a new social field of existential order in competition with the fields whose claim to truth has become doubtful. If the quest succeeds in finding the symbols that will adequately express the newly differentiated experience of order, if it then finds adherents to the new truth and durable forms for their organization, it can indeed become the beginning of a new social field. The account of these personal and social events, however, does not exhaust the story to be told; in addition, the successful establishment of a field of differentiated order creates new structures in history through its relations to other social fields. For the quest, if successful, imposes on the older fields the previously not existent characteristics of falsehood or lie; this imposition will provoke movements of resistance from the adherents to the older, more compact truth, as well as from the discoverers of verities alternative to both the old and the new truth; it will furthermore meet with the social obstacles of spiritual dullness and indifference; and it will encounter movements of skepticism aroused by the new plurality of verities. The quest, thus, is not only its own beginning. By restructuring the social fields at large in their relation to the truth of order, it marks the beginning of a new configuration of truth in history. Since the questioner's quest is accompanied by his consciousness of the event as a beginning in the personal, social, and historical dimensions of order, the questioner has to tell quite a story indeed. It is the story of his experience of disorder, of the resistance aroused in him by the observation of concrete cases, of his experience of being drawn into the search of true order by a command issuing from the It-reality, of his consciousness of ignorance and questioning, of his discovery of the truth, and of the consequences of disorder unrestrained by regard for the order he has experienced and articulated. The event as a beginning is the story of an attempt to impose order on a wasteland of disorder.”
