132 struggling with the worldthat the predominance of method over vision and the hardening of
distinctions among disciplines impose upon our ability to think and
speak about what matters most. It can hasten, in each discipline, the
pace of intellectual innovation. Change in ideas and attitudes combines
with change in institutions to enable the mind as imagination (non-
modular, non- formulaic, and possessed of the powers of recursive in-
fi nity and of negative capability) to prevail over the mind as modular
and formulaic machine.
Th e idea of the openness of history is thus both a claim of fact and a
goal of action. As a claim of fact, it seizes on a defi ning trait of our
humanity— our transcendence over all context— and interprets every
aspect of our constitution and experience in the light of the dialectic
between circumstance and transcendence. As a goal of action, it re-
quires a progressive change not just in the content of social and cul-
tural arrangements but also in their quality, that is to say in the charac-
ter of their relation to our structure- resisting and structure- transcending
powers.
For the believer, our success in making history more open, as well as
in recognizing the fundamental openness that, by virtue of being hu-
man history, it can never lose, is the complement and continuation of
an earlier change. God guaranteed that our history would be open
when he created us as embodied spirit. He allowed us to make good on
this openness by intervening in history. In the vocabulary of Christian
theology (with counterparts in each of the other Semitic religions of
salvation), his redemptive work, manifest as grace, enables us to win
freedom from sin, which is separation from him, from others, and thus
from ourselves.
For the unbeliever, the openness of history, both as a claim of fact
and as a goal of action, gives us a chance to change the quality as well as
the content of the social and cultural contexts that we build and in-
habit. It ensures, as well, a vast space for the exercise of our imaginative
powers: our ability to understand the actual, in society and in history,
from the vantage point of the accessible alternatives.
Th e dominant approaches to the understanding of society and history,
however, deny the openness of history to one degree or another. Classi-
cal Eu ro pe an social theory, as most fully exemplifi ed by the work of
Karl Marx, affi rmed the idea that the structures of society are human