Читать книгу The Religion of the Future - Roberto Mangabeira Unger - Страница 9

Central idea, historical presence, and metaphysical vision

The natural world—the stage for our tormented passage from birth to death—is indifferent to mankind and largely impenetrable to the mind. It is inhuman and vastly disproportionate to us. Unable to peer into the beginning or the end of time or to measure the outer limits or hidden depths of reality, we remain confined to explaining parts of the world, without ever being able to grasp the relation of the part over which we cast light to the indefinitely larger part that stays unseen. We flatter ourselves in vain that our more or less successful ways of explaining pieces of nature will enable us to explain nature as a whole. The whole remains eternally beyond our reach.

With respect to our greatest good, the good of life, nature works against us. It cheats us of what matters most. It responds to our experience of boundless fecundity, of power to surprise and to overcome, by dooming us to decline and destruction. It is little consolation that life may be denied to the individual only to be granted in spades to the species. We live as individuals, and will not survive to witness the fate of the collective for whose persistence our annihilation is supposed to be indispensable.

The world is meaningless. Its meaninglessness lies in our inability to make sense of its reality and history in terms pertinent to human concerns: our commitments, attachments, and engagements. If the world is meaningless, so, until further initiative, is our place within it. Will this larger meaninglessness—the groundlessness and aimlessness of human life when viewed from outside, in its cosmic context—overshadow all that we are able to experience and accomplish within our human realm? Or shall we succeed in preventing the meaninglessness of the world from undermining our ability to ground ourselves?

We can step back from the edge of the abyss and build a human realm sufficing to itself. In this realm, human beings create meaning, albeit in a meaningless world. The power and authority of their production of light can be all the greater by virtue of its contrast to the surrounding darkness and of the consequent urgency and value of the saving intervention. Only in this way can we rescue ourselves from the absurdity of our condition.

The creation of meaning in a meaningless world is not, however, a matter of mere speculative fabrication. It is not enough to spin out consoling stories about our position in the universe. In fact, such an activity forms no part of our rescue, the premise of which is to acknowledge unflinchingly the reality and the gravity of our situation. It is the securing and the improvement of what is human, not a changed description of what is non-human, that can save us.

The aim is to ensure that society not be contaminated by the meaninglessness of the world, that it not operate under the sway of forces and according to standards that make life among our fellows almost as alien to our deepest concerns as is nature to the shared experience of humanity. If this inner line of defense fails, all is lost. If we can hold the enemy, of life-shadowing meaninglessness, at bay, in the zone between an indefensible outer line and an indispensable inner line, we can go forward. We have reason to hope.

In the transformation of the human world, we must succeed in preventing force and guile from overtaking cooperation and solidarity. At any moment a struggle may break out over the terms of social life—the terms on which people lay claims to one another’s loyalty and labor and to the resources produced, or made useful, by labor. This struggle may be accompanied by war among states or societies.

Any social and cultural order amounts to a temporary halt in this practical and visionary fighting. However, if that is all it is—an unconditional surrender of the defeated to the triumphant, the order will not be stable because it will not be legitimate in the eyes of either the losers or the winners. Its arrangements will not be susceptible to being read as fragments of an intelligible and defensible plan for cooperation. Consequently, they will be incapable of being translated into laws that can be interpreted, elaborated, and applied in the mutable and varied settings of social life.

Will society amount to the enslavement of the many by the few under disguise? Will its principle be the exhaustion and despair of the enslaved and the anxious vigilance of their masters? Will the disguise be culture? Will the possibilities of cooperation and the claims of solidarity be held hostage to the requirements of a scheme of subjugation, tolerated as the sole remaining alternative to continued violence and insecurity and sanctified by the hopelessness of both its manifest victims and its supposed beneficiaries?

If all these evils come to pass, the order of society and culture will take on the attributes of meaningless nature. The inner line of defense will be broken. We shall have to retreat into what Max Weber called “the pianissimo of personal life.” In that domain of intimacy, we may hope to sustain what remains of a life that speaks to our most intimate concerns.

It is not enough to describe the modification of social life necessary to avoid such a result in negative terms. It has an affirmative content. The overriding goal is to reshape our relations to other people according to a vision of what we owe one another by virtue of occupying certain roles: friend and friend, husband and wife, parent and child, teacher and student, ruler and ruled, boss and worker. In this saving exercise, we shall be guided not only by the practical imperatives of the division of labor in society but also and above all by a sense of the relativity of these roles with respect to our common humanity.

Fate has cast us in different roles. The centrality of roles to the organization of society reveals our dependence on one another. This dependence is a mark, rather than a denial, of our humanity. It reveals our strength as well as our weakness. Cooperation, organized through the performance of roles and the observance of social conventions, is not only a requirement for the advancement of our practical interests; it is also an expression of a basic fact about our humanity. Incomplete in ourselves, we complete ourselves through service to others. To serve them, we must understand them. Thus, the development of our imagination of the otherness of other people—the perception of their states of consciousness—forms part of the process by which we complete ourselves, affirming and developing our humanity. Such imagination must inform our performance of social roles.

What is sacrosanct is the person, together with the fine texture of relations among individuals. All else in society and culture remains subservient to the experience of personality and of personal encounter. In a meaningless world, only personality and the relations among persons are hallowed. We should recognize one another as instances of the sacred—that is to say, of that which can create meaning. Everything else in society is a means to an end.

The nourishment of personality and of personal encounter can alone count as an end in itself: its value is not ancillary to the attainment of any other purpose. To turn ourselves into beings who act in this spirit because they understand one another and their situation in this way is the overriding goal of social reform. Our success in this enterprise determines whether we can make a practical success of life in society and prevent it from degenerating into a nightmare of force and guile.

In conformity to this aim and in the service of this goal, the division of labor in society must be softened and spiritualized. It must become the vehicle of our role-based practices of cooperation and of our slowly developing capacity to imagine one another. Our cooperative practices, anchored in the performance of social roles, must be both accommodated and spiritualized, according to the demands and the resources of each historical circumstance. Ravenous self-interest must be mastered in the interest of such a humanization of social life. Some element of hierarchy may be admitted, but only so long as it can be justified by the practical requirements of coordination (rather than by belief in the intrinsic qualities of different classes and castes). Only to the extent that we reform society in this way can we prevent its fall into a nightmare of domination, and tame selfishness.

Such a program affirms its fidelity to the goals inspiring the past religious revolutions. It upholds, in practice as well as in doctrine, the preeminence of our shared humanity over the divisions and hierarchies within humankind. It repudiates the heroic and martial ethic of lordship and honor, and replaces it with a vision of the attenuation of the contrast between the instrumental and the non-instrumental, the brutal and the spiritualized, the prose and the poetry of social life. It remains far from offering a full-fledged political and moral program. It does, however, describe the starting point of such a proposal.

This program may at first seem not to exemplify the first and most fundamental attribute of those religious revolutions: the establishment of a dialectic between the transcendence and the immanence of the divine in the world. For the overcoming of the world, the transcendent divine is impersonal and unified being, in which the beings that populate our phenomenal experience must find ultimate reality and value. For the humanization of the world, it is the experience of personality itself, dwelling in our social experience but never exhausted by it or reducible to it.

Here is an idea of transcendence that is neither identical to the expression of transcendence in the Semitic religions of salvation nor entirely foreign to that expression. In those religions, the narrative of transactions between God and humanity represents a deepening and a reevaluation, rather than a cancelling out, of our experience of personality and of personal encounter. God himself is represented in the category of personality; the dangers of anthropomorphism stand balanced against the stratagems of the analogical imagination.

That is a sketch of the humanization of the world as a long-standing option within the religious history of humanity, presented in its core beliefs and without regard to the varieties and specificities of its evolution.

The most comprehensive and influential example of this orientation is the teaching of Confucius, as presented in the Analects. The subsequent tradition of neo-Confucianism often departed from this tradition by trying to ground the reformation of society in a metaphysical view of the cosmos. In this respect, it resembled the Hellenistic philosophies that connected a practice of self-help against the flaws in human life to a view of the world.

Thinkers sympathetic to this tradition have often tried to ground it in a metaphysical doctrine rather than to conform to the discipline of an anti-metaphysical metaphysic. None have succumbed to this temptation without paying a price damaging to the force of this response to the world. The price lies in the need to make the metaphysical conception shape the existential imperative—the message about how to live; otherwise the pretense of inferring the latter from the former will seem an empty gesture.

However, such a metaphysical system risks being no more than a fairy tale, easy to devise and easy to reject. Persuasively to inform the project of humanizing the world, it will need to be much more specific in its claims about the structure and evolution of nature and society than the philosophies that inform the overcoming of the world. For these philosophies, it may be enough to propose a radical simplification that either denies phenomenal distinction and temporal change or reinterprets them against the backdrop of the supposed archetypes of manifest reality. A metaphysic operating under such constraints cannot appeal to a dramatic historical narrative of dealings between God and humanity like the stories central to the Semitic monotheisms. Such narratives invite a shaking up of the social order, a rebellion against conventional morality and its role-encoded standards of conduct.

It is an outcome that conflicts with the humanizing program; it brings struggle instead of humanization. Although a metaphysic intended to support the humanization of the world may speculate about the reasons for which nature and society take one form rather than another, it remains bereft of the experimental practices, the empirical disciplines, and the technological tools of modern natural science. It is condemned to be a waking dream: an argument in which the conclusion is already set and only the premises remain open to exploration.

Moreover, the special pleading required to provide the humanization of the world with a metaphysical prop faces the speculative humanizer with a dilemma. If he leaves loose the connection between metaphysics and morals, he makes the prop seem a transparent attempt to conceal the failure of the humanizing effort to be grounded in any feature of natural reality outside society and humanity. If, however, he insists on the tightness of the link between morals and metaphysics, he not only draws attention to the flimsiness and arbitrariness of the metaphysical conception but also risks imposing on the moral view a direction alien to the motivations inspiring it. The invocation of a privileged, suprahuman or extrasocial perspective on humanity and society threatens to blunt our claims on one another. It dims the significance of our relations to our fellows by making these attachments and commitments seem secondary to our citizenship in a cosmic order.

So it is that in the rerouting of the humanization of the world into metaphysics, a doctrine of human connection, translated into a role-based conception of our duties to one another, has regularly given way to a quest for individual perfection, or to a search for composure in the face of suffering and death, or to a calculus and classification of the most reliable pleasures. Self-help takes the place of solidarity. Eudaimonism and perfectionism—the happiness and the improvement of the individual—become our guides. Other people recede into the distance; at best they become the beneficiaries of a superior benevolence, not the targets of a devotion that we express and sustain through the fulfillment of our role-based responsibilities.

The intended result becomes ever less the humanization of a meaningful social world as a bulwark against meaningless nature. It becomes ever more the rescue of the individual from the injustices of society as well as from the sufferings of the body, thanks to a superior access to fundamental truths. Instead of being reformed and humanized, society is dismissed; it is pushed into the background of an existential ordeal that we must overcome through the marriage of virtue to philosophical insight. Such was the course of neo-Confucianism, of the Hellenistic metaphysics of self-help, and of all the many ways in which the proponents of the idea that human beings create meaning in a meaningless world wavered in their doctrine.

Making meaning in a meaningless world

Free from the failed attempt to base its response to the defects of the human condition on the vision of a cosmic order, the humanization of the world is made out of three building blocks. Each of the three is vital to its conception and to its program.

The first component in this orientation to existence is the link that it establishes between the meaninglessness of nature and the human construction of meaning in society. The human world must be self-grounded in a void. It cannot be grounded in anything external to itself—whether extra-human nature or supra-human reality—that would guide and encourage us.

We are natural but nevertheless context-transcending beings. Our embodiment, however, fails to establish our kinship with inhuman nature. We can explore nature around us, extending our powers of perception with the physical tools of science. We can develop our understanding of the relations among phenomena with the conceptual tools of mathematics. When, however, we project our concerns unto nature, and suppose it sympathetic to our purposes and intelligible from within, as if animated, we deceive ourselves.

Viewed from one angle, nature has favored us because we live. Viewed from another, it is set against us because we are doomed to die without any chance to grasp the ultimate nature of reality or the origin and end of time. We know, however, that our reckoning of the favors and burdens of nature is wholly one-sided; there is no one here but us to whom to make complaint or give praise. There is no mind on the other side, neither the universal mind invoked by the overcomers of the world nor the transcendent mind of the living God. Mind exists exclusively as embodied in the mortal organism.

Only our own efforts can create meaningful order—meaningful to us—within the meaningless void of nature. Meaning is constructed in culture and expressed and sustained in society in networks of relations among individuals. Each of us will die. Each of us stands at the edge of the precipice of groundlessness. Each of us remains subject to the call of wild desire. Each of us must content himself with a particular course of life and a particular place in society, and resign himself to being denied a second chance. However, within the space defined by these unsurpassable limits, we can shape a collective order that is made in the image of our humanity, and by the standards of our concerns, rather than in the image of meaningless nature.

The supreme expression of the social creation of meaning within the meaningless void of nature is law: law understood as the institutionalized life of a people, developed from the bottom up. Through the self-regulation of society as well as from the top down, through state-made order. It is in law that a coercive division of labor becomes an intelligible and defensible plan of cooperation.

Although the struggle over the terms of social life never ceases, it can be contained. Law is the expression of this truce. However, if such an armistice is all that law were, it could be understood only as the repository of a haphazard correlation of forces between the winners and the losers in earlier contests for advantage. Law must be revised and reinterpreted as the repository of a way of organizing social life. Such a scheme will transform the generic idea of society into a series of images of association: views of how the relations among people should and could be arranged in different domains of social life. Such images of association will in turn inform the ideas used to guide the elaboration of law in context.

Our situation and our task

The second component of the humanization of the world is the view of the work to be done: our quandary, our task, and the resources available to us to execute it.

Interdependence and the imagination of others are constitutive features of our humanity. We depend on one another for everything, and remain helpless without the cooperation of others. The development of the capabilities of mankind in every realm and at every level depends on the progress of our cooperative practices and capabilities.

Our imaginative access to other people deepens the significance of interdependence. The consciousness of the individual, however, although expressed by a mind embodied in an individual organism, cannot adequately be understood as a self-sufficient entity, a natural object with a defined perimeter, a fortress from which we anxiously look out on the other citadels around us and try to discern what goes on within them.

The brain is individual. However, the mind as consciousness is from the outset social. The means by which we develop a subjective life, from language to discourse, from ideas to practice, are all a common possession and shared construction. A central paradox of consciousness is that we can be both obscure to one another (in the enigmas of intention and experience) and entirely dependent, even for our self-awareness, on practices and powers, such as language, that must exist socially to exist at all. In a world that is meaningless, except by virtue of the meaning and value that human beings create within it, only the personal is sacred, sacred in the twofold sense of the ancient Indo-European civilizations: of what has commanding value as well as of what presents the greatest danger.

No philosophical vocabulary is wholly complete and adequate as a means with which to describe the sense of this sanctity. In one vocabulary, to recognize the sanctity of personality and of interpersonal relations is to see and to treat the person—both one self and the other—as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. In another vocabulary, it is the view that personality and the interpersonal represent our closest approach to the absolute: that which has value and meaning unconditionally and without limit, and therefore resists comparison, as infinite quantities are incomparable.

This absolute, unconditional good exists, however, only as manifest in the natural incidents of human life—beginning with the facts of birth, ascent, decline, and death, and the sequence of generations—as well as in the practical organization of society. The issue central to this second part of the humanization of the world is how we are to understand and to guide the relation between the facts of interdependence, intersubjectivity, and sanctity of the personal and the building of a real social order against the background of the natural circumstances of social life. There is a danger, and there is a remedy.

The risk is that interdependence, reciprocal subjectivity, and the sacred value of personality will be overwhelmed and degraded in the course of the events by which the social order is made and sustained. The order always has an accidental and violent history. It begins in a struggle, and then in the containment of the struggle: its partial and temporary interruption. The war, interrupted in the large, may continue in the small; the peace may be the continuation of the war in veiled and hamstrung form. Each individual will assume his place and play his part according to the distribution of winners and losers in the conflicts from which the order arose. Stability will result from exhaustion, impotence, and fear. The victorious will be as anxious as the defeated are resentful.

The exercise of oppression may over time be modulated by reciprocity. Subordinates as well as superiors may begin to find advantage in the acceptance of their respective lots. Exchange and power will combine in the same relationships. However, reciprocity will always remain a supervening and accessory influence, circumscribed by arrangements and assumptions that it did not create and cannot reconstruct.

In such a circumstance, interdependence will be shaped in the mold of the grinding hierarchies of power and advantage, transmitted and reproduced from generation to generation, to which the settlement of the struggle gave rise. Our understanding of other people’s experience will take the form of a shared surrender to beliefs that lend a patina of naturalness, necessity, and authority to that settlement. Awareness of the sanctity of the personal will be suppressed, or survive only as a residual hope, clinging to the familiar and to the intimate.

It is not the interpretation of interdependence and intersubjectivity from the perspective of the sanctity of the personal that will turn the social order into something more than the temporary resolution of an ongoing conflict; it is the practical imperative of the division of labor in society. Suppose that the economy has already attained a level in the development of its productive capabilities at which vast combinations of people, put to work in specialized tasks, under stark hierarchical supervision, can yield a large surplus over present consumption. Imagine, however, that society has not yet reached the point at which we have learned how to repeat most of the initiatives needed to produce such a surplus, to express the activities susceptible to repetition in formulas, and to embody the formulas in machines so that we can devote most of our time to the actions that we do not yet know how to repeat.

Such an intermediate situation has been the circumstance of the major historical civilizations, at least until very recently. It was in particular the circumstance of the agrarian-bureaucratic empires that represented, before the last two hundred years, the most important states in the world. The world religions characteristically emerged at the periphery, rather than at the center, of such states.

This situation favored a strongly defined social division of labor: the division of society among distinct classes, estates, or castes, reproduced through the hereditary transmission of advantage, and marked by distinct forms of life and of consciousness as well as by different degrees of access to the key society-making resources of economic wealth, political power, and spiritual authority. A particular way of organizing the social division of labor, and the distinct roles to which it gave rise, reduced the possible forms of cooperation to what the triumphant institutional and ideological settlement countenanced. The characteristic Indo-European distinction between the rulers and priests, the warriors, the merchants, and the workers represented a simplified and widespread instance of such a system.

It is not that this hierarchical ordering of society into hereditary classes was in any sense necessary, given these opportunities and limitations; a much more egalitarian and flexible regime of cooperation might, and sometimes did, face the limitations and seize the opportunities all the more effectively. It is rather that such a social division of labor provided a way of organizing cooperation that respected the preexisting distribution of advantage. Just as this distribution of advantage favored a class or caste order, the existence of the order supported a technical division of labor marked by extreme hierarchy and specialization.

The technical division of labor—the allocation of powers and responsibilities in the organization of work—was likely to assume, under such circumstances, its most hierarchical and specialized form: rigid contrasts between tasks of supervision or planning and tasks of execution, clear-cut contrasts among the jobs of execution themselves, unequivocal distinctions between the activities judged appropriate for cooperation and for competition. Industrial mass production—the production of standardized goods and services, with the help of rigid machines and production processes, reliance on semiskilled labor, and very specialized and hierarchical work relations—as it developed in the historical period from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth was at once the latest and the most extreme example of this approach to the technical division of labor.

This scheme is no mere historical parable. It is a rudimentary account of a way of organizing social relations that prevailed, in one variant or another, in all the societies in which the religions of transcendence emerged. It served to entrench both the hierarchical organization of labor and the coercive extraction of an economic surplus over current consumption. This form of social organization exacted a high price in return for its uses as an instrument for the accumulation of an economic surplus as well as for the hierarchical direction of labor on a large scale. It drastically limited the range and varieties of cooperation: the extent to which the ways in which we organize cooperative work track the analytic and synthetic operations of practical reason. Any such scheme required those activities to conform to a script—the two-part script of the social and of the technical division of labor. The result severely limited the potential for cooperative effort.

It also generated second-order problems for this approach to life. Many attempts have been made in the history of civilization to give higher meaning and value to a social division of labor with the characteristics that I have enumerated. None was more striking in influence and ambition than the grounding of the actual Indian caste system in a scriptural caste order validated by the high Hindu doctrine of reincarnation of an indestructible soul.

Insight into the essential unity of mankind and into the shallowness of the divisions within it, an idea central to the religious revolutions of the past, made any such doctrine seem repellent and incredible. How can we acknowledge the force of this insight into the shallow and ephemeral character of our divisions and hierarchies while continuing to tolerate a social and technical division of labor with such features?

If we cannot abolish and replace a social order of this kind, we must at least be able to change it. However, it has seemed throughout most of history, which has been the history of class society, that such an order cannot, or cannot yet, be abolished or replaced. The mere attempt to do so threatens to make the war over the basic terms of social life break out again.

If, however, we fail to transform the character of that order, we risk defeat in the most important effort: the effort to create meaning in a meaningless world. For if the attempt to sanctify the class or caste regime of society fails, if its sole basis remains its contestable practical use in the development of the productive capabilities of mankind and the coercive extraction of a surplus, turning the individual into the hapless instrument of a supposed advantage for the future race, then the inner line of defense against the meaninglessness of the world will be broken. The content of interdependence and mutual subjectivity will be determined by forces without meaning and value in the biographical time in which we must live our lives rather than in the historical time in which the human race advances. The sanctity of the personal will count for nothing and will be discredited by daily experience.

What matters most to the humanizers is that society offer a bulwark against nihilism, if by nihilism we mean the idea that the world and our lives within it are meaningless, that is to say without meaning in any terms that have weight within our discourse, the discourse of humanity. Humanism so conceived has as its precondition nihilism about the world—or rather about our ability to make sense of our situation in the world on terms that communicate with our concerns and commitments.

From this perspective, any attempt to ground the realm of human values in natural facts outside human life is self-defeating as well as futile: it makes humanity subservient to something inhuman. Nihilism about the world and the self-grounding of humanity are therefore not opposites; on the contrary, they are complements. Humanity snatches the crown away from the cosmos and puts it on itself.

The tragic aspect of this undertaking lies in the contradictions of the social order rather than in the shadow cast by nihilism. The individual is powerless to ensure the necessary self-grounding; only men and women in society can achieve it through collective action. They may fail. The building and reproduction of a social order can fall victim to forces that pervert interdependence and curtail social imagination, because they disrespect the sanctity of the personal. Then nihilism will have its day. To avoid that outcome is the aim of this orientation to existence.

Something, however, remains missing from this account: the centerpiece of the political and moral strategy by which this goal is to be achieved. To define this strategy is the work of the third part of this direction in the religious experience of mankind.

The ennoblement of our relations to one another

The third component of the humanization of the world is a view of what can and should be the basic structure of our relations to one another. The social division of labor is a system of social roles: the stereotypical, regulated positions that individuals occupy in society serve as platforms from which they deal with one another. If we are to humanize the social division of labor, and by extension the technical division of labor, we must ensure that the performance of such roles vindicate the sanctity of the personal. We must prevent people’s dependence on one another from serving as the occasion for a barely contained war over the basic terms of social life, in which only a self-interested reciprocity attenuates the harshness of endless struggle.

An ethic of roles, of what we owe one another by virtue of playing the parts that we do in society, is therefore the characteristic moral instrument of the project of humanization: the superior to the underling, the teacher to the student, the husband to the wife, the parent to the child, and, more generally, each according to his station or trade, his assumed responsibility in the larger life of society as well as in his immediate family and community. That public order is best which best creates the conditions most propitious to the adoption of such an ethic.

We can understand the supposed relation between this ethic of roles and the public order by analogy to the relation between the nineteenth-century doctrine of private law and its corresponding conception of public law. Private law defined the system of freedom, the scheme of ordered liberty, to be upheld against any contamination by the initiatives of a state bent on making this system serve the interests of particular groups (e.g., redistribution as the law-subverting capture of the state by class or factional interest). In such a view, the most important standard by which to judge a regime of public law was that it not corrupt, through politically directed redistribution, what was supposed to be the distributively neutral law of coordination among free and equal individuals: private law. At the same time, it was charged with creating a political space within which the system of private rights could flourish, for example, by providing for the public goods of security and education.

But what is the content of an ethic of roles? General ideas about the sanctity of the personal and the rescue of interdependence and reciprocal subjectivity from the continuation of war by other means remain powerless, all by themselves, to supply the answer to this question. The answer begins to become clear only against the background of the ways in which societies have actually been organized. A defining issue is whether we are to accept the established structure of society as the horizon within which to pursue the humanization project or to resist that structure as the chief obstacle to the implementation of this project. To bring this question into focus, consider two circumstances.

One circumstance has been characteristic of most societies and cultures in world history before the national and world revolutions of the last two hundred–odd years. It is the association of power, exchange, and sentiment in the same social relationships. Its characteristic formula is the sentimentalizing of unequal exchange—a relation between individuals in more powerful and less powerful roles, involving a trade of practical advantage, overlaid by reciprocal allegiance. The patron-client relation, so precious to the ancient Romans, provides a characteristic example. It was in such a circumstance that the most comprehensive statement of the ethic of roles—classical Confucianism—emerged.

Another circumstance is that of a nineteenth-century European society with its liberal ideology. Now the authoritative ideological formula proscribes what relations between patrons and clients require: the mixture of power, exchange, and allegiance. One of the consequences is to draw a distinction between the domestic sphere, in which the mixture of sentiment, power, and exchange continues to be tolerated or even cherished, and the workaday world, in which such a mixture has become anathema. In this world, exchange supposedly rules, and power is validated by consent, by the requirements of cooperation, and by the rights of property.

In such a setting, speculative thought may seek to base and to expound ethics in a discourse of universalistic rules and principles. However, this academic moral philosophy will bear little resemblance to the forms of moral thinking and argument deployed in much of social life. A discourse of role-based claims and responsibilities will continue to prevail in practice, although recast on the basis of the new assumptions. What chiefly replaces the amalgam of exchange, power, and allegiance is an ethic of professionalism: respect for the public duties pertaining to the specialized roles that the individual performs.

The role-based responsibilities may be owed to strangers, with whom the individual had no preexisting relation. As a result, it becomes impossible to accept the distinction, characteristic of societies at ease with the mixture of exchange, power, and allegiance, between a realm of high-trust relationships among insiders and of no-trust relationships among strangers. A modicum of trust, albeit of low trust, among strangers, must be universalized as the indispensable backdrop to an ethic of professional responsibility.

Instead of supposing that we owe everything to those to whom we have a connection that precedes or transcends the will and nothing to those with whom we have no such connection, we come by steps to think that we owe something to everyone, but that what exactly we owe is modulated by the roles we perform in society with respect to them. On the foundation of minimalist and universal trust among strangers, we superimpose the more stringent demands that attend the performance of our individual roles. The market economy itself can be represented as a form of simplified cooperation among strangers, unnecessary when there is high trust and impossible, given the ineradicable incompleteness of contracts, when there is no trust.

Gradually, the levels of both generalized trust and specialized responsibility can rise. Their joint ascent will, in this new circumstance, signal the advance of the project of humanization. The individual, however, may continue to live in two worlds: the public world of work and of dealings among strangers, given over to the new moral dispensation, and the domestic world in which, uncomfortably and under pressure, the ancient marriage of exchange, power, and allegiance survives.

This second world may be more than a residue of the old, now forbidden combination. It may also be the seat of a prophecy of a higher form of life. Its guiding aspiration may cease to be the superimposition of allegiance and sentiment on the harsh realities of power and exchange and become instead the softening of the tension between spirit and structure, love and routine, with regard to the possibilities of reconciliation between two individual beings. The life plan of each becomes part of the other one’s plan. Here, however, we reach the limits of a role-oriented mode of moral thinking and confront problems and possibilities with which such a form of thought is unable to deal.

Criticism: betrayal of the past

I now apply to the humanization of the world the same method of criticism applied earlier to the overcoming of the world: its power to realize the goals that were common to these three orientations to existence, its prospect of conforming human nature to its view of the good, and its relation to the concerns that may or should be central to the next revolution in the history of religion.

There are two crucial respects in which the humanization of the world, as exemplified by the teachings of Confucius, comes up short by the standard of its fidelity to the aspirations shared by the religious revolutions of the past. The first respect concerns its relation to the dialectic between transcendence and immanence: the most important point of contrast between the religions and philosophies that exemplify the three orientations to life considered here and the beliefs that they replaced. The second respect in which the humanization of the world fails to do justice to the shared element in the religious revolutions of the past has to do with its attitude to social division and hierarchy.

The assertion of transcendence—of the transcendence of the divine or the sacred over nature and society as well as of our human powers to transcend the circumstances in which we find ourselves—remains insecure within this approach to existence. Nothing in its anti-metaphysical metaphysics or in its naturalistic moral psychology provides an adequate basis on which to affirm our power to resist and overcome the social and conceptual regimes in which we find ourselves enmeshed.

For the Semitic monotheisms, the chief instance of the struggle with the world before the rise of the modern secular projects of political or personal emancipation, transcendence takes the unmistakable form of the separation of God from the world. The problem then becomes how this chasm, once opened up, is to be bridged: through some countervailing embodiment of the divine in humanity and in history. For Buddhism or its precursors in the metaphysics of the Vedas, transcendence lies in the superior reality of hidden and unified being, viewed in relation to the phenomenal and temporal world.

For Confucianism, as the most influential example of humanizing the world, our power of transcendence over circumstance and presupposition, if it has any meaning or force, has as its seat the experience of the personal and of personal encounter, viewed in relation to everything else. What is most real and valuable about this experience lies in a web of relations to others; the personal to be nurtured and revered is the interpersonal.

The sacrosanct experience of the personal stands in contrast primarily to dark nature, which we must master and turn to our purposes but cannot hope to fathom. Secondarily, it remains opposed to the regime of society, which deserves our allegiance only insofar as it respects and sustains this sacred core of existence. The spirit of the interpersonal has, for Confucianism, its consummate expression in jen: the quality of self-expression and self-formation that is expressed in both sympathy and detachment.

The premise of this devotion is our ability to understand the experience of others. Imagination—the imagination of their inner life and aspirations—informs our efforts to minister to their needs. It does so on the basis of the social roles that each of us performs.

The affirmation of the sanctity of the personal (or, more precisely, of the interpersonal) is not peculiar to Confucianism; it is a trait of all the many versions of the humanization of the world that have appeared in the course of the religious history of humanity. Even in our partly Christianized culture, it is captured by a conception that exerts a wide influence today: the view of intimate encounter as a domain of the private sublime, in which we can accept the instrumental calculus of interests and efficiencies only insofar as such calculation serves an experience beyond instrumental concerns.

To form part of a naturalistic account of our powers of transcendence, the idea of the sanctity of personality and of personal encounter 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 humanization of the world. Because there is no such natural ordering of our relations to one another—or no ordering that we have reason definitively to accept as the framework for our efforts to come to terms with one another—the struggle over the organization of society must and will go on. It may be temporarily contained and interrupted. However, it will not long be suppressed.

The advancement of all our interests and ideals, as we understand them at any given time, requires that we criticize and change pieces of the structural background of social life. There is, however, always more than one defensible understanding of the direction of change that our ideals and interests require. As we progress in the work of reconstruction, the disharmonies in the content of the interests and ideals that guided us in the first place become apparent, and provide further occasions for conflict.

The perennial nature of this struggle over the terms of social life exposes the limitations of this approach to life. It also casts doubt on the metaphysical conception informing the humanization of the world. The assumptions of the humanizing campaign become patent in the effort to establish a meaningful order, within a meaningless cosmos: a clearing that bears the imprint of our concerns within a dark and inhospitable universe.

Ongoing struggle over the terms of social life, made possible by the indefeasible contestability of every social order, ends up tearing down some of the barriers of social division within humanity even as it erects others. Whether it undermines or creates such divisions, it reveals, by its continuance, their contingency, and thus invites further practical and visionary strife.

It is not just the walls within society that end up, in this way, coming down or being moved around. It is also the walls around society: the clarity of the distinction between the social order, constructed on our scale and to the specification of our concerns, and the great stage of nature, vastly disproportionate and indifferent to our desires. Any regime of social life remains forever contestable. Its contestability is made manifest by persistent conflict over the terms of social life. As a result, we cannot expect any such regime to bear the full weight of our desire to establish a social order that remains untainted by the alienness of nature and casts back to us our own reflection.