pragmatics of sufficiency forms men and women who work only to uphold a certain customary form of life. When they have done so, they stop working. They do not allow themselves to be driven by an impulse toward relentless striving and accumulation. The character of their experience of life in society guards them—so the argument goes—against the ordeal of insatiability.
The question can then be presented squarely: Are we the beings who become insatiable only when we depart from the theology of immanence and the pragmatics of sufficiency? It is true that there is a history of desire, as there is a history of ideas informing desire. This history, however, is not aimless or random. It does not converge to a single end. Nevertheless, it has directions. Its directions are not to be mistaken for the scales of divine justice. However, they reveal, in the course of time, who we are and what we can become.
The restraints imposed by the theology of immanence and by the pragmatics of insufficiency inhibit the development of our powers: not just of our powers of production but also of all our powers of invention and innovation. They prevent us from pressing against the limits of the practices, institutions, and assumptions about human association that hold all our interests and ideals ransom. They require us to treat one structure of life and thought—the established one—as our definitive and authoritative home in the world. We cannot do so, however, without pretending to be more like the other animals than like gods.
The falsehood of this pretense is prefigured by the irrepressible element of uncertainty about what the established regime of life and of thought is, and about how this regime is to be understood and upheld as circumstances change and conflicts arise. No real society can fully conform to such a script. No real individual can be made into the passive performer of the lines that the script assigns to the occupant of each social role. If he does not defy the script openly, he will nevertheless rewrite it secretly. The falsehood of the pretense is further confirmed by the irreversibility of any departure from this supposed Arcadia. No people and no individual could ever return to this Eden, once having experienced the advantages as well as the troubles of its disruption.
The revolutionary changes that are associated with the rejection of both the theology of immanence and the pragmatics of sufficiency have aroused, and will continue to inflame, all humanity. Their influence, despite all calamities and reversals, will appear as a force that is irresistible and providential not only because it empowers us but also because it reveals us to ourselves.
If the variations of society and culture cannot save us from our insatiability, can some of our initiatives as individuals nevertheless shield us against it? Can we not have in love and in work experiences that wholly absorb us, modify or even suspend our sense of the passage of time, without depriving us of consciousness, and interrupt the cycle of unrequited desire?
Indeed, we can, if we are both lucky and wise, but only for a while. The work will come to an end, and no longer represent for its creator what it represented in the throes of creation. The love, ever tainted by ambivalence, will cease to waver only if it ceases to live. The work and the love will be seen to be the particular engagement and the particular connection that they are, and we will continue to seek, absurdly and inescapably, something that is not just one more particular. Our reprieves from insatiable desire will be momentary; our insatiability will remain as the lasting undercurrent of our experience, thrown into starker relief by its remissions.
Insofar we are death-bound, existence is urgent and frightful. Insofar as we are groundless, it is vertiginous and dreamlike. Insofar as we are insatiable, it is unquiet and tormented.
Belittlement
“The true sorrow of humanity consists in this;—not that the mind of man fails; but that the course and the demands of action and of life so rarely correspond with the dignity and intensity of human desires; and hence that, which is slow to languish, is too easily turned aside and abused.” So wrote the poet Wordsworth, describing what we may be tempted to mistake for a fourth irreparable flaw in the human condition.
No feature of our humanity is more important than our power to go beyond the particular regimes of society and of thought in which we participate. We can always do, feel, think, or create more than they bless, allow, or make sense of. The fecundity and amplitude of experience outreach all the formative limitations imposed upon it.
For the same reasons and in the same sense, no social role in any society can do justice to any individual human being. No scheme of social organization can accommodate all the activities that we have reason to value or all the powers that we have cause to exercise and to develop. This excess over the determinate circumstances of existence should excite in the mind the idea of our greatness, or of our share in the attributes that some of the world religions have ascribed to God.
Nevertheless, the ordinary experience of life, although punctuated by moments of joy, which may be sustained and prolonged by our engagements and attachments, is one of blockage and humiliation. The persistent disproportion between our context-transcending powers and the objects on which we lavish our devotions threatens to turn existence into an ordeal of belittlement. “In every house, in the heart of each maiden, and of each boy, in the soul of the soaring saint, this chasm is found,—between the largest promise of ideal power, and the shabby experience.” “So each man,” wrote Emerson, “is an emperor deserted by his states, and left to whistle by himself.”
The extremes of economic deprivation and social oppression to which most of mankind has been condemned for most of history make this ordeal seem all the more bitter and inescapable. If, however, we look beyond the surface of life, we see that not even the privileged, the powerful, the gifted, and the lucky are free from the burdens of belittlement. For these burdens result universally from the recurrent, shaping incidents of a human life. Even a man whose circumstances and fortune have shielded him from deprivation and oppression must face these trials in three successive waves in the course of his existence.
First, at the beginning he must be driven out of the sense that he is the eternal center of the world. He must come to understand not only that he is just one among countless many but also that he will soon be nothing. Even if he allows himself to be persuaded that he will gain eternal life, he cannot regain the illusion of being at the center.
Later, he must resign himself to taking a particular course in life, if indeed the course is not imposed on him by the constraints of society. If he resists committing himself to such a course, he does not become universal; he merely becomes sterile and sick. However, the consequence of the particularity of the course of life is to open a rift between who we ultimately are and know ourselves to be and how we must live. The individual knows himself darkly to be more, much more than his outward existence reveals. Instructed by the world religions and, today, by the democratic and romantic creeds, he may even feel that he is entitled to scale the heights of experience and vision because he has unplumbed depths. That, however, which he knows himself ultimately to be he is unable to express in a course of action in the world. The result is that existence becomes an ordeal of self-distortion and self-suppression. It is not the tragedy of Hamlet alone; it is every man’s pain.
He faces the burdens of belittlement a third time as he grows older, and settles into an existence that he has embraced, or that has been forced upon him. A carapace of routine, of compromise, of silent surrenders, of half-term solutions, and of diminished consciousness begins to form around him. He turns himself over to the rigidified version of the self: the character. He begins to die small deaths, many times over. He fails to die only once, which is what he would desire if he were able fully to recognize the value of life. This third encounter with belittlement reveals belittlement for what it in fact is: death by installments.
It is crucial to a moral and political vision, and therefore as well as to any religion, that it mark in the right place the division between the inalterable circumstances of existence and the alterable arrangements of society. To represent flawed and revisable ways of organizing social life as inescapable is
