Khatam al Hikam (The Seal of Wisdom)

In the name of God, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful

Essay I | Man as the measure: A criterion for complete religious realisation

I Introduction

One must ask, before engaging in any comparative argument about religion, the fundamental question of what a complete account of the human existence actually requires. This question precedes those of truth, antiquity, or practice. Before a comparative analysis of these can be made, one must first establish a framework through which they can determine a measure of man's becoming as viewed through the lens of the various traditions. This framework itself must be independent of what any tradition itself claims to provide and, accordingly, concern what the nature of man itself demands from any framework that claims to address it fully. 

We seek to answer that question before any analysis is made, and we aim to proceed entirely from attention to what man is. From the essential structure of human existence as it presents itself to careful philosophical scrutiny, and from that attention derives a criterion. This criterion cannot be borrowed from any religious tradition; to do this would be tantamount to reverse engineering a framework from an established tradition and to present it to the world, claiming that that tradition is the one that is most suitable to answering the question of man's becoming in its most complete form. Clearly, an attempt such as this would only be arguing circularly for the superiority of one's own tradition. Instead, we attempt to read off from the human condition itself what any account of that condition’s complete resolution would have to accomplish. This must be done by drawing on philosophy, anthropology, phenomenology, and the philosophy of action in order to arrive at a criterion of man's becoming. Once this criterion is established, it will then be applied to six major traditions; whether any tradition meets it is a question left entirely open. However, the criterion itself must stand or fall on its own merit, accountable to anyone willing to examine the structure of human existence carefully, regardless of what they believe, or whether they believe anything at all. The remainder of this essay, therefore, derives from the structure of human existence itself a criterion of complete realisation, prior to any judgement concerning which tradition satisfies it.  

II The structure of the problem

The question of complete religious realisation is not, in the first place, a theological question. It does not presuppose faith, revelation or the authority of any particular tradition. It is, before all of this, a philosophical one, and it arises from a datum so widely attested across human cultures and epochs that its denial would itself require extraordinary philosophical justification. The datum being the following: everywhere that human beings have reflected carefully on what they are, they have identified a gap between what they are and what they might or ought to be. Although the vocabulary changes dramatically across traditions and centuries (corruption and restoration, ignorance and illumination, exile and return, alienation and reconciliation, dispersal and unification, forgetfulness and recollection), the underlying structural observation is the same. Man, as he ordinarily finds himself, is not what he is capable of being. Something has not yet been accomplished and remains unrealised. This near-universal recognition is not, by itself, a proof of anything theological. One need not conclude from it that the gap is real, that it is closable, or that any tradition’s account of how to close it is correct. But one must conclude from it that the question of realisation is a genuine philosophical question with a determinate structure; that it is not merely the projection of particular cultural anxieties onto a neutral human condition, but a response to something genuinely present in the structure of human existence itself. The persistence of this recognition across conditions of radical cultural divergence is itself philosophical evidence that what is being pointed at is real, even where the pointing differs. 

The philosophical task, then, is to take this structural datum seriously. If there is a gap, the shape of the gap constrains the shape of any complete solution. One cannot resolve a problem by addressing something other than what the problem actually is. This might seem obvious when stated, but it has severe implications. It means that before an evaluation or comparative analysis of any tradition is possible, one must first ask, with precision, what the human being is that requires realising. The criterion of completeness is not external to the problem; in fact, it is derived from the problem's own structure. What the human being is determines what a complete resolution of its condition would have to accomplish. This point can be sharpened further. The gap is not simply a gap between a present state and an absent good, as though the human being lacked something merely contingently, the way one might lack a possession or a skill. The gap, as serious philosophical anthropology has consistently recognised, runs through man's most constitutive features. It is a gap in what the human being essentially is, not merely in what it happens to have or do. This is why accounts of realisation that confine themselves to technique, to the acquisition of capacities, the modification of behaviour, the cultivation of affect, have always struck their most penetrating critics as insufficient. If the gap is constitutive, its resolution must be constitutive. A surface account of what man is will produce a surface criterion of realisation; only a complete account of the human being will yield a criterion adequate to the depth of the problem. This is why the derivation of the criterion cannot begin with traditions, however venerable or with accounts of what various human beings have reported about their realised states. It must begin with the question of what man structurally is and what features belong to man essentially, such that any account of his complete resolution must address them. These features, once identified, will yield the criterion directly. Their identification is the task of the section that follows. There is, however, one further preliminary observation that must be made before that derivation is attempted. A criterion derived in this way will necessarily exhibit a certain formal constraint: it must be capable of condemning any account that fails to meet it as incomplete, regardless of how ancient, how widely received, or how internally coherent that account may otherwise be. A criterion that cannot exclude is not a criterion. The willingness to derive and apply a standard that may find even the most celebrated accounts wanting, that may even find every account wanting, is the philosophical commitment this inquiry requires. Whether any tradition actually satisfies the criterion is a question left entirely open. That some might fail to do so, including traditions of great depth and antiquity, must remain a genuine possibility throughout. Only on this condition does the criterion function as a genuine measure rather than as a conclusion masquerading as a premise.

III The five essential descriptions of man

The derivation of a criterion of complete realisation requires, as its first step, an account of what man essentially is. Not what he believes, not what he aspires to, and not what any tradition has said about his destiny, but what he structurally, constitutively is, such that any account of his fulfilment must address these features or be found wanting. Five such descriptions present themselves to careful philosophical attention. They are not five separate theses but five dimensions of a single being, each irreducible to the others, each necessary to the whole.

Man as individual 

We begin first and foremost with man as an existence that is irreducibly first-personal. There is a here from which the world is encountered, and that here cannot be transferred, shared, or dissolved without remainder into any collective. The consciousness that registers experience, that undergoes suffering and joy, that deliberates and chooses and remembers, is not a feature of man in the abstract but of this specific instantiation of man in its irreplaceable singularity. This is not merely the observation that individuals differ from one another, which is trivially true, but the deeper phenomenological claim that the structure of experience is first-personal through and through. One cannot experience another’s experience. One cannot deliberate from inside another’s deliberation. One cannot die another’s death. This irreducibality is not a conitingent feature that further analysis might dissolve; it is constitutive of what it means for a human being to exist at all. The implications for any account of realisation are immediate. Any account that dissolves the individual entirely, whether into a collective, a tradition, a cosmic principle, or a divine unity in such a way that leaves nothing of the first-personal structure standing, has not realised the individual but abolished it. Whether abolition is what some traditions intend is a question for analysis; that abolition and realisation are not the same thing is a philosophical observation that must be made before any such analysis begins.

Man as embodied

The first description might suggest that the human being is essentially an inner life, a stream of consciousness that happens to find itself attached to a body. This suggestion must be resisted at the outset, because it fundamentally misrepresents the structure of human existence. The human being is not a consciousness housed in matter, not a ghost operating a machine, not an inner citadel from which the outer world is observed. It is a being whose existence is inseparable from its physical instantiation, and that inseparability is not a deficiency to be overcome but the very form of its being in the world.

Merleau-Ponty's contribution here is decisive. The body is not the instrument of the self but its ground. Before I reflect on my body, before I make it an object of attention or manipulation, I already am my body, in the sense that all my engagement with the world is structured by a bodily orientation that precedes deliberate thought. I do not first perceive space abstractly and then locate myself within it; I perceive space as near and far, as accessible and resistant, as up and down, because I am already a being with a posture, a reach, a direction of movement. Perception is not a mental operation that uses the body as its instrument; it is a bodily achievement in which subject and world are already in commerce before reflection intervenes. Pain is not a signal the body sends to a mind located elsewhere; it is suffered by this being that I am. The vulnerability of the flesh is not incidental to my existence but constitutive of it; I am mortal precisely because I am embodied, and my mortality is not an obstacle to what I am but a structural feature of being the kind of thing I am.

This has severe implications for accounts of realisation that proceed as though the body were a prison from which the real self must escape, or a temporary and ultimately irrelevant vehicle for a higher existence. Any such account has not merely adopted a low view of matter; it has misidentified the subject it proposes to realise. If the human being just is an embodied being, then a realisation that consists in the liberation of an inner essence from its bodily condition has not realised the human being but something else, something arrived at by subtracting from the human being what is in fact essential to it.

Man as constitutively social

The third description is in some ways the most liable to misunderstanding, because the claim being made here is not the relatively uncontroversial observation that human beings tend to live together or that social life is beneficial to them. The claim, following the Aristotelian tradition in its most careful formulations, is stronger: the human being is not social by preference or by instrumental necessity, but by nature. Sociality is not something added to an already complete individual; it is a constitutive feature of what that individual is.

The argument runs through language. Language is not a tool that pre-formed individuals independently develop and then use to communicate thoughts they already possessed in some private, pre-linguistic form. It is the medium in which human thought first becomes determinate. The categories through which I understand myself, the concepts with which I structure my experience, the narrative frameworks through which I make sense of my own life, are all inherited from a linguistic community that precedes me and will outlast me. I did not invent the language in which I think; I was initiated into it, and that initiation was not merely the acquisition of a new instrument but the formation of the very cognitive capacities that make me the kind of being I am.

The same point extends from language to morality. The moral concepts through which I evaluate my own actions and those of others, through which I identify what counts as betrayal or loyalty, courage or cowardice, justice or its violation, are not derived from first principles by solitary reason. They are acquired through participation in practices, institutions, and traditions that embody particular forms of moral understanding, what MacIntyre has called the tradition-constituted character of moral rationality. One does not reason about ethics from nowhere; one reasons from within a form of life, and that form of life is always already social.

The conclusion that follows is not that the individual is merely a product of social forces, which would be an overcorrection that simply inverts the error it opposes. The individual is real, as the first description established, but it is a social individual, one whose identity, rationality, and moral formation are constitutively communal. A realisation that addresses only the individual in isolation from the community in which that individual exists and has its being has addressed an abstraction rather than the actual human being. Any account of realisation that requires withdrawal from communal life as a permanent condition, rather than as a temporary mode of deepening, has not resolved the human condition but evaded one of its essential dimensions.

Man as historical

The fourth description concerns time, but not time understood as the medium through which human beings move from one moment to the next in the way that a traveller moves through space. The human being is not in time the way objects are in a container; it is constitutively temporal in the sense that its very being is structured by temporal relations that cannot be separated from what it is. Heidegger's analysis remains the most penetrating account of this structure.

The human being exists always as already having been. Its present existence is never a pure now but carries with it a past that it has not chosen and cannot fully make its own but from which it cannot detach itself. I find myself already in a language, a culture, a family, a historical situation, a set of commitments and inheritances that I did not elect and that nevertheless constitute the ground from which I begin. This thrownness is not a limitation imposed on an otherwise timeless subject; it is the form of human finitude as such. Equally, the human being exists always as projecting forward into possibilities that it has not yet actualised but toward which its present existence is already oriented. I am always already on the way to something, structured by anticipation as surely as by memory. And these two dimensions are not separate; the past that I carry shapes the future I can envision, and the future I anticipate retroactively organises my understanding of the past I inherit.

The implication for accounts of realisation is direct. Time is not the problem the human being must escape; it is the structure of its existence. A realisation that requires the permanent transcendence of temporality, that demands the evacuation of historical situatedness as the condition of completion, has not realised the human being but abolished the temporal structure that is constitutive of it. This does not mean that no human experience points beyond ordinary time, or that no tradition is right to speak of an encounter with what is eternal. It means that any such encounter, if it is to be the realisation of this human being and not the dissolution of it, must stand in some coherent relation to the temporal and historical existence from which the human being cannot be separated.

Man as transcendentally oriented

The fifth description is the one that every account of realisation addresses most directly, but it must be introduced here as a phenomenological observation rather than as a theological claim. Whatever the ultimate explanation of this feature, and the explanation is precisely what is in dispute between traditions, it is a structural feature of human existence that it is constitutively oriented beyond itself toward something it did not create, cannot contain, and cannot finally satisfy itself with any finite substitute for.

This orientation is not identical with religious belief. It is present in human beings who deny any theological account of it. It appears in the experience of moral demand, where the claim that bears down on the human being in genuine ethical obligation does not seem to originate from within that human being and cannot be reduced to social pressure without losing what is essential to it. It appears in the experience of beauty, where the human being finds itself arrested by something that exceeds its own projections and to which it responds as to something given rather than constructed. It appears in the phenomenon of love, particularly in the forms of love that are most resistant to reduction, in which the beloved is encountered not merely as satisfying a need but as possessing a worth that makes a claim independent of the lover's interests. It appears most forcefully in the experience of the sacred, which is irreducible to aesthetics, to ethics, or to any functional satisfaction, and which has proven remarkably resistant to elimination even under the most sustained conditions of secularisation.

The philosophical point is not that these experiences prove the existence of any particular object of transcendent orientation. It is that the structure of human existence includes, as one of its constitutive features, an orientation that no finite object permanently satisfies and that cannot be definitively closed off without doing violence to what the human being is. A human being that has ceased to be oriented beyond itself in this way has not achieved a more complete form of existence; it has lost one of the dimensions essential to its humanity. Any account of realisation that refuses to address this orientation, or that proposes to resolve the human condition by extinguishing the orientation rather than by meeting it, has not resolved the human condition but amputated one of its constitutive features

These five descriptions are not a system derived from a single principle. They are an attempt to read off from the structure of human existence what belongs to it essentially, prior to any particular account of how that existence is to be understood or resolved. Each description constrains what a complete account of realisation must accomplish. Taken together, they yield a criterion with determinate content: a complete resolution of the human condition must address the individual in its irreducible first-personality, the embodied being in its irreducible materiality, the social being in its irreducible communality, the historical being in its irreducible temporality, and the transcendently oriented being in its irreducible openness to what lies beyond it. An account that addresses fewer than all five has addressed a partial human being. Whether any tradition succeeds in addressing all five is the question to which this inquiry now turns.

IV. The Criterion and the Elaboration-Remainder Distinction

From the five essential descriptions of the human being, the criterion of complete realisation follows with a directness that requires no additional premises. It may be stated precisely as follows: a complete account of human realisation must address the human being under all five descriptions simultaneously, and it must do so without generating internal tensions between them that require resolution from outside the structure itself. Each word of this formulation carries weight and must be held strictly.

To address the human being under all five descriptions means, in the first place, that no description may be treated as eliminable. A realisation that succeeds in addressing the individual but cannot account for the body has not realised the human being; it has realised an abstraction arrived at by subtracting embodiment from what is in fact an embodied existence. A realisation that succeeds in addressing the individual and the body but treats sociality as a contingent feature to be managed rather than a constitutive dimension to be transformed has addressed something less than the whole. And so with each description: historical situatedness and transcendent orientation are not optional features that an account of realisation may attend to at its discretion; they are dimensions of what the human being essentially is, and any account that fails to address them has failed to address its subject. The criterion is therefore, in the first instance, a criterion of comprehensiveness. A complete account must be comprehensive with respect to all five descriptions, not as an external requirement imposed upon it, but because the subject it proposes to address just is this five-dimensioned being.

But comprehensiveness alone is insufficient, and this is where the second clause of the criterion becomes operative. It is possible to construct an account that nominally addresses all five descriptions while generating irresolvable tensions between them. One might, for instance, affirm the irreducibility of the individual while also insisting upon a form of communal life so totalising that the first-personal structure is effectively absorbed into the collective, leaving the affirmation of individuality as a formal concession without substantive content. Or one might affirm the importance of embodiment while directing the primary energy of realisation toward an inner dimension so exclusively that the body's constitutive role is acknowledged in principle and negated in practice. These are not merely logical inconsistencies of the sort that might be corrected by more careful formulation; they are structural tensions that arise from the attempt to satisfy incompatible demands within a single framework. When such tensions arise, the question the criterion poses is precise: can the tension be resolved from within the structure's own resources, or does its resolution require an appeal to something the structure cannot itself supply?

This question brings into view the distinction between elaboration and remainder, which is the operative measure the comparative essays that follow will apply. The distinction is philosophically real, and its reality is independent of any application to any particular tradition. It concerns the internal logic of any comprehensive framework when it is brought into contact with problems that arise from within its own commitments.

Elaboration is what occurs when a complete structure, in encountering new contexts, new historical circumstances, new formulations of perennial difficulties, deploys its own internal resources to address them. The structure, in such cases, is not being supplemented from without; it is unfolding implications that were always already present within it, though perhaps unrealised. MacIntyre's account of how traditions develop provides the most careful philosophical analysis of this process. A living tradition, on his account, is precisely one that is capable of self-extension: it carries within itself not only a set of established conclusions but the resources for recognising new problems, adjudicating new conflicts, and appropriating new insights while maintaining the continuity of the commitments that define it. The tradition that can do this is not merely repeating itself; it is discovering what it always implied, making explicit what was latent, and demonstrating through its capacity for development the depth of the original structure. Elaboration is thus the sign of completeness, not the sign of incompleteness. It is what a genuinely complete framework does when time and circumstance bring new challenges before it. The capacity for elaboration is itself evidence that the original structure possesses the resources to meet what has genuinely arisen from within its own logic.

Remainder is a categorially different phenomenon. It arises not when a framework encounters genuinely new external problems but when the framework's own internal commitments generate, through their own logic, a difficulty that the framework cannot resolve from within its own resources. This distinction must be held precisely. A remainder is not merely a difficulty; every significant intellectual framework encounters difficulties, and the capacity to engage difficulties is not itself evidence of structural inadequacy. A remainder is a specific kind of difficulty: one that arises because the framework's own structure requires it to affirm two things that, when their implications are fully traced, cannot be jointly sustained without recourse to resources the framework does not itself possess. The remainder is therefore a symptom of incompleteness in the original structure. It reveals that what was presented as a complete account was in fact a partial one, capable of addressing certain dimensions of the problem while generating, through its very mode of addressing them, unresolvable tension with respect to the others. The remainder is not introduced from outside by a hostile critic; it is produced by the framework's own internal movement, by the implications of its own commitments when those commitments are followed consistently to their conclusions.

The distinction between elaboration and remainder thus maps precisely onto the criterion as stated. Elaboration is the development of a complete structure's implications across new contexts; it leaves the criterion satisfied because the capacity for such development is itself evidence that all five descriptions are genuinely addressed within the structure, with sufficient depth to sustain engagement with whatever arises from them. Remainder is what appears when a structure's own logic generates problems it cannot resolve from within its own resources; it reveals that the criterion is not fully met, because a tension between two or more of the five descriptions has emerged that the structure cannot absorb. A tradition capable only of elaboration satisfies the criterion. A tradition that generates genuine remainder does not, regardless of the antiquity, sophistication, or internal coherence it may otherwise possess.

Several clarifications are necessary here to prevent the distinction from being applied more crudely than its philosophical character warrants. First, the presence of internal debate within a framework is not, by itself, evidence of remainder. Any framework of sufficient depth will generate genuine disagreement among its most able practitioners about how its commitments are to be understood and applied. This kind of disagreement is compatible with elaboration, and may in fact be a sign of the vitality that elaboration requires. What distinguishes genuine remainder from productive internal debate is the character of the irresolvability involved. Internal debate, however prolonged or intense, leaves open the possibility of resolution through the deeper appropriation of the framework's own resources; the disagreement itself is conducted in terms the framework supplies, and its resolution, however difficult, would represent the development of the framework rather than its transcendence. Remainder, by contrast, is marked by an irresolvability of a different character: the problem cannot be resolved through deeper appropriation of the framework's resources because the problem has been generated by those very resources. Further development within the framework does not dissolve the tension; it may, and often does, intensify it.

Second, the distinction does not require that a framework generating remainder be abandoned. It requires only that the remainder be acknowledged as such, that it be recognised as a structural feature of the framework's incompleteness rather than explained away as a difficulty that further elaboration will eventually dissolve. The philosophical task is one of honest diagnosis, not of prescription. Whether a tradition generating remainder is to be developed, supplemented, replaced, or held to in spite of its incompleteness are questions that arise after the diagnosis and that the criterion itself does not answer.

Third, and most importantly for the application that follows, the criterion as formulated is intended to function as a genuine measure and not as a conclusion dressed in the form of a standard. This means it must be capable of finding any account wanting, including accounts of great depth and antiquity. It must also be capable of finding no account fully adequate, if that is where the evidence leads. The measure is applied to traditions; it is not derived from any of them, and its verdict, whatever it turns out to be, is answerable only to the structure of the human existence from which it was derived. The five descriptions are the measure's foundation; the elaboration-remainder distinction is its operative instrument; and the criterion as a whole stands or falls on the adequacy of the philosophical account of the human being from which both are drawn.

V. The Circularity Objection Answered

The criterion as derived is liable to a serious objection that must be answered before the comparative analysis proceeds. The objection runs as follows: a criterion that requires an account of realisation to address the embodied, social, and historical dimensions of human existence will, by its own structure, favour traditions that produce comprehensive legislation governing the body, communal life, and historical practice. Such traditions are not difficult to identify, and a critic with sufficient philosophical suspicion might reasonably conclude that the criterion has been reverse-engineered from precisely those traditions it is designed to vindicate. If that is so, the criterion is not a genuine measure at all but a conclusion masquerading as a premise, and the entire inquiry collapses into the circularity it was designed to avoid.

The objection is serious precisely because it cannot be dismissed as philosophically naive. It belongs to a recognisable and legitimate tradition of ideology critique, and its force depends not on any particular empirical claim but on a structural suspicion about the relation between criteria and conclusions. If the criterion was constructed by attending first to certain traditions and then abstracting from their features a standard that those features happen to satisfy, then whatever appearance of independence the criterion projects is illusory. The standard and the verdict would have been determined together, and the analysis interposing between them would be theatre.

The response, however, is equally structural, and it operates at the level at which the objection was raised. The criterion was not derived by attending to traditions and abstracting from their outputs. It was derived by attending to the human being as it presents itself to careful philosophical scrutiny, prior to and independently of any account any tradition gives of it. The five descriptions of man are not features selected because certain traditions address them; they are features that any sufficiently careful philosophical anthropology must acknowledge, features that have been identified, in varying vocabularies and with varying degrees of precision, across the full range of the philosophical tradition, from Aristotle's account of the political animal, to Heidegger's analysis of thrownness and temporality, to Merleau-Ponty's account of embodied perception, to the phenomenology of moral demand and transcendent orientation that cuts across traditions of belief and unbelief alike. The objection would only succeed if these descriptions were tendentious, if they selected features that happen to be addressed by particular traditions while ignoring features those traditions cannot address. It must therefore be pressed at that level: if the critic holds that one or more of the five descriptions is either not genuinely constitutive of human existence or has been characterised in a way that biases the analysis, that objection is a philosophical one and it is answerable on philosophical grounds. What cannot be sustained is the structural suspicion alone, the claim that circularity is present without any demonstration of where in the derivation the tendentiousness was introduced.

There is, furthermore, a decisive consideration that the objection must confront directly. The criterion, as formulated, is genuinely falsifiable in a sense that a circular criterion is not. A circular criterion is constructed to be satisfied by its intended conclusion; it cannot, by its own nature, find that conclusion wanting. The criterion derived here carries no such guarantee. A tradition that appears, on initial examination, to address all five descriptions may, on closer analysis, generate remainder precisely at the points where it attempts to hold all five descriptions simultaneously. The criterion does not determine in advance which traditions will satisfy it and which will not. It is equally capable of finding the traditions that produce the most comprehensive practical legislation wanting, if the comprehensiveness of that legislation is purchased at the cost of irresolvable tension with respect to, say, the irreducible first-personality of the individual or the genuine character of transcendent orientation. That such a finding is genuinely possible, that the traditions most apparently favoured by the criterion's surface structure may fail to satisfy it at a deeper level of analysis, is precisely what falsifiability requires. A criterion that cannot find its apparent favourites wanting is not a criterion. That this one can, and that its application may issue in unexpected verdicts, is the strongest philosophical evidence that it is not circular but genuine.

VI. Conclusion

The criterion is established. What follows in subsequent essays is its application. The reader who disputes the criterion should engage it here, on philosophical grounds, before proceeding. The reader who accepts it is invited to examine whether it is applied honestly. The criterion itself makes no promise about which tradition satisfies it. That question is left entirely open until the analysis is done.

What has been accomplished in this essay is therefore strictly preliminary, but it is preliminary in the sense that a foundation is preliminary to what it supports: not incidental to it, but the condition of its integrity. Without a criterion derived independently of the traditions to which it will be applied, the comparative analysis that follows would be, at best, an exercise in the illumination of internal differences between traditions, and, at worst, a sophisticated form of advocacy dressed in the language of impartiality. The criterion is what makes genuine comparison possible. It is the fixed point from which measurement proceeds, and its fixity is secured not by stipulation but by the philosophical account of human existence from which it was drawn. If that account is wrong, the criterion fails, and it should fail. The essays that follow are only as trustworthy as the foundation laid here.

It is worth pausing, before the analysis begins, to register what the criterion does not do, precisely because the temptation to read into it more than it claims will be persistent. It does not predict a victor. It does not assume that any tradition will be found fully adequate, nor does it assume that some must be. It does not rank traditions by the sophistication of their theology, the antiquity of their practice, the number of their adherents, or the impressiveness of the civilisations they have shaped. These are not nothing, but they are not what the criterion measures. What it measures is narrower and more demanding: whether a given account of human realisation addresses the human being under all five of its essential descriptions without generating, through its own internal logic, a remainder it cannot resolve. By that measure alone the traditions will be examined, and by that measure alone any verdict reached will stand or fall.

The reader approaching the subsequent essays should therefore hold two things simultaneously. The first is a willingness to follow the analysis wherever it leads, including toward conclusions that may be unwelcome, whether because they find a cherished tradition inadequate, or because they find a tradition one had dismissed more adequate than expected. Intellectual honesty in an inquiry of this kind is not a methodological nicety; it is the condition under which the inquiry is worth undertaking at all. The second is a sustained critical vigilance directed at the application of the criterion itself. A criterion correctly derived can be incorrectly applied, and the analysis that follows is not exempt from that possibility. If the criterion is applied selectively, if remainder is identified in traditions the author disfavours while equivalent tensions in favoured traditions are reclassified as elaboration, the criterion will have been honoured in its derivation and betrayed in its use. The reader's scrutiny is therefore not merely permitted but required. The criterion is a shared instrument, answerable to anyone willing to examine the structure of human existence carefully, and its application is answerable to the same standard.

One final observation is owed before the analysis begins. The question this inquiry addresses, what a complete account of human realisation must accomplish, and whether any tradition accomplishes it, is not an abstract question. It is the most concrete question available to a human being, because it concerns what the human being is and what, if anything, resolves the gap between what it is and what it is capable of being. The philosophical formality of the criterion should not be mistaken for distance from that question. The formality is in service of precision, and the precision is in service of honesty, and the honesty is in service of a question that every human being who has reflected seriously on its own existence has already encountered, however it has chosen to name it or to answer it. The essays that follow do not resolve that question. They attempt only to bring to it the rigour it deserves.