134 struggling with the world
In all these ways, our ruling ideas about society and history prevent
us from making sense of the openness of history and deny us guidance
about how to make it more open.
- Th e self has unfathomable depth. We can best approach the meaning
of this part of the vision that informs the struggle with the world by
considering to what it stands opposed. In the fi rst instance, it opposes
the reduction of the self to its social station. Such a station places us as
protagonists within an established plan of social division and hierar-
chy. Th e individual becomes the embodiment of his caste, his commu-
nity, or his role. He acts out the plan that his station lays in his hands.
In this respect, the idea of the depth of the self exemplifi es a theme
shared by the breakthroughs that resulted in the three orientations: the
shallowness of the divisions within mankind. No form of these divi-
sions lasts forever. No script that they assign to an individual, instruct-
ing him what to do and how to feel, deserves more than conditional
and temporary obedience or cuts to the core of his humanity.
Th is conception of the self opposes as well, albeit less obviously, the
reduction of the individual to his own character, the rigidifi ed form of the
self. Th e dialectic between formula and surprise has pertinence to every
aspect of our experience. Routine and repetition create a structure within
which the unexpected can occur and have meaning. However, the rigid-
ity of a whole orientation to our tasks and engagements represents, in the
light of this view, a denial of our inexhaustibility by fi nite circumstance.
In this respect, the idea of the depth of the self goes beyond the be-
liefs that are common to the religious revolutions that produced the
higher religions, or the religions of transcendence: the ways of thinking
that expressed and developed the three approaches to existence that I
here consider. Th e depth that this idea affi rms is just the reverse side of
our transcendence. At its center lies the confrontation with the dispar-
ity between all the fi nite conditions of existence and the longing for the
infi nite. From this disparity arise the temptations of false transcen-
dence and idolatry. Sanctifi cation of any one social order represents a
special case of these temptations: the inclination to project our longing
for the infi nite onto an unsuitable fi nite vehicle. From it there results as
well our susceptibility to belittlement amid the constraints and com-
promises that put the lie to our transcendence over context.
