struggling with the world 137of its relation to its circumstances. By appropriating a term from the
vocabulary of Christian theology, we can call it the conception of em-
bodied spirit. Here, however, I use this term wiped clean of all sectarian
theological content and made neutral between the sacred and the pro-
fane versions of the struggle with the world.
Incarnate in dying organisms that are inseparable from the self, we
are shaped by the social and cultural contexts that we inhabit. Together
with our ge ne tic endowment, these contexts make us who we are. We
cannot pretend to fl oat above them. Th ey nevertheless fail to exhaust us.
Th ere is always more in us, in each of us individually and in all of us
collectively— the human race— than there is or ever can be in them.
Th ere is more than is or can be not just in a par tic u lar institutional re-
gime or system of belief; there is also more than is or can be in all re-
gimes and systems put together. Th is point is not specifi c to any aspect
of our social and mental experience; it applies to every aspect.
Th is abstract proposition may seem inoff ensive only so long as we
fail to acknowledge its radical implications for our self- understanding.
Here are three examples taken from widely diff erent realms of experi-
ence and presented at a level of detail suffi cient to suggest what is at
stake in the conception of embodied spirit.
Th e institutional arrangements of the market economy, expressed in
the details of the law, set limits to how we can cooperate with one an-
other and combine people and resources in the production of goods
and ser vices. Th ey determine the ways in which we can reconcile our
stake in the decentralization of economic initiative with our interest in
taking advantage of economies of scale. Th ey establish the terms on
which we can command or use one another’s labor: through free coop-
eration or through the wage relation, which continues to bear, to a greater
or lesser extent, the taints of slavery or serfdom. Th ey arrange the forms
and requirements of our access to decentralized claims of capital, and
consequently draw as well the boundary between private action and
the regulatory or redistributive power of the state.
Any such repertory of arrangements, defi ned in the rules and doc-
trines of law, may prove more or less elastic. We may even come to or-
ga nize the market economy so that it ceases to remain fastened to a
single version of itself: a single, exclusive regime of contract and prop-
erty. It is much better to provide for the experimental coexistence of