I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take full advantage of the full range of human possibilities. (Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, Commencement Address At Harvard, June 8, 1978)

a) Solzhenitsyn’s reference to “the full range of human possibilities” must have to do with “free spiritual development”. To be free in regard to “human possibilities”, one would have to know their “full range”. But what if certain “human possibilities” cut off access to other possibilities because the former are bent on “destroying” the latter and know only the relationship to them of “tense competition”?

b) In this case, it would seem “free spiritual development” is not the result of some exercise of thought or action, but the precondition to access to “the full range of human possibilities” – from which fully human thought and action would first be possible. But how to arrive at such a precondition? How “to arrive where you are, to get from where you are not”? (Eliot, from San Juan de a Cruz)

The World Split Apart segments continue here.