must be combined with an iconoclastic attitude to the institutional and ideological settings in which personal experience takes place. However, it cannot be so combined without accommodating a conception of the self that is foreign to it and that takes our moral and political imagination in a completely different direction. This conception is the idea of a human being as embodied spirit, an idea that has been central (as I later argue) to the tradition of the struggle with the world, in its profane as well as its sacred registers.
According to this idea, there is more in us, in each of us individually as well as in all of us collectively, than there is or ever can be in the social and conceptual regimes that we inhabit. Although they shape us, we exceed them. Our transcendence over context is expressed in the idea, central to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, that we already share in the attributes of God. We can increase our share in these attributes thanks to the partnership between divine redemption and human striving.
Belief in our transcendence over context may take—and in much of the world does take—a purely secular form, presupposing no faith in a narrative of dealings between God and humanity. Such secular creeds may speak to the self and the mind, or to society and its transformation. However, even when they deal with the personal, they also address the political. When they neglect to connect ideas about the self and the mind with ideas about society and its reconstruction, they do justice to neither. They then fail fully to vindicate the idea of embodied spirit. They leave the claim of our powers of transcendence undeveloped, ungrounded, and, above all, lacking in a vision of what to do.
Consider, as an example, a view of the mind that, in a contemporary vocabulary, exemplifies the idea of the person as embodied spirit. The mind has a dual character. In some respects, it is like a machine, made up of modular parts and operating according to formula. In other respects, it is an anti-machine, equipped with the power to overstep its own settled methods and presuppositions.
The relative power of this anti-machine, which we call the imagination, is not shaped solely by physical features of the brain, such as its plasticity. It depends, also and even chiefly, on the organization of society and culture. This organization may widen or narrow the space for the workings of the imagination, and afford it or deny it equipment. For this reason, the history of politics is internal to the history of the mind.
Any such vision of our radical transcendence, with or without belief in the encounter between God and mankind, is alien to the humanization of the world. It relies on ideas about us and our place in the world that contradict the assumptions of this tradition of thought and recommend rejecting the moral and political attitudes it favors.
Without the support of some such vision, the idea of the sacred character of personal connection remains a weak basis for an ideal of transcendence. We do not experience personality and personal encounter in a social and historical vacuum. We experience them in a setting prepared for us by the history of a particular society. Will it be our purpose to reinvent this template or merely to improve it; to make it serve our ascent to a higher form of life or to content ourselves with a modicum of success in diminishing its cruelties? Will we nurture the hope of at last making ourselves at home in a social world transformed by our enhanced ability to imagine the experience of other people and to attend to their needs, according to the social stations of each person, or will we come to see such a desire to settle down in a humanized society as a betrayal of our nature and vocation? By the answers that the humanization of the world gives to these questions, it shows that it has only a diminished version of transcendence to offer.
If the criticism of its fidelity to the spirit of transcendence is the first objection to be made to the humanization of the world, as a response to the concerns motivating the religious revolutions of the past, the second objection is that it offers too limited a justification for the effort to devalue or to overturn the social divisions within mankind.
The chief civilizing device of the humanization of the world, already clearly stated in the Analects of Confucius, is the dialectic between the roles, rules, and rituals of society and the development of our other-oriented dispositions. Our induction into roles, rules, and rituals teaches us to abandon our primitive self-centeredness. It begins to form, in each of us, a nature turned to the experience and the aspirations of others. Slowly, this now socialized nature of ours is elevated and even transfigured by the development of our ability to imagine other people. Eventually, if we persist in this trajectory of moral ascent, that which was conditioned by ritual and rule becomes spontaneous. Our obligations begin to converge with our inclinations; or, rather, our inclinations discern, within and outside the rituals and rules, the path of service to others and of self-mastery.
“At 15, I set my heart on learning; at 30, I took a stand; at 40, I had no illusions; at 50, I knew the Mandate of Heaven; at 60, my ear was attuned to the truth; at 70, I followed my heart’s desire without overstepping the bounds of right.” It is the specifically Confucian form of an idea that two thousand years later, in the context not only of a different time but also of another vision, appears in the writings of, for example, Émile Durkheim. For the spiritual orientations that I here discuss are not simply evanescent tendencies of thought, confined to isolated moral teachers; they are lasting options in the spiritual experience of humanity, and they reappear in countless forms.
The principal setting of the dialectic between individual consciousness and social form is the system of social roles. By assuming a role and performing it according to its customary dictates, we continue our passage from self-centeredness to society and reciprocity. By infusing the performance of the role with the imagination of otherness and with the spirit of humanity, formed in reverence of the personal, we enter, by steps, into the possession of ourselves. Rules and rituals become a ladder that we can kick away.
Now the vital question that any such view must face is in what spirit it will address the established social regime. A system of roles exhibits a division of labor in society. It forms part of a scheme of social division and hierarchy, including the class structure of society. Is this scheme to be accepted and rendered more humane? Or is it to be defied and reshaped?
In every real historical version of this orientation to existence, the limit of reformist ambition has been to restrain class selfishness and to reshape class in the light of merit. Even the mixture of power, exchange, and allegiance, characteristic of the agrarian-bureaucratic societies in which the humanization of the world first arose, has been ordinarily accepted as the realistic alternative to endless struggle. There is no vision or energy here to inspire a program of radical reconstruction. Where would such a vision and energy come from if not from view of the transcending self, combined with an idea about our power to change the character as well as the content of the established structures of life and thought?
The abstract idea of society has no natural and necessary translation into any particular way of organizing social life. Are we then to accept the structure that history presents us with in a given society, with all the hierarchies and divisions that it supports and the role of the dead over the living that it embodies? Are the conformity of advantage to merit (as assessed by some collective or governmental authority) and the restraint of power by regard for others to serve as our sole reprieves from these forces?
If there is no definitive structure, whether of society or of thought, capable of accommodating all the experience that we have reason to value, there can at least be a structure that strengthens the hand by which we resist and revise the established structure in the light of experience. And there can be a path of cumulative structural change calculated to lighten the burden of the entrenched scheme of social division and hierarchy weighing on the possibilities of cooperation. For such an advance to occur, however, we need both another account of the self and another conception of the structures and of their history. Under such views, no role can be fully adequate to a human being. No set of institutions and practices supplies an acceptable resting place for society.
The absence of any natural ordering of society reveals the link between the political and the metaphysical limits to the
