struggling with the world 143surrendering to it. Th ere will soon be occasion to pursue, as an unde-
veloped implication of the struggle with the world, the idea that we
have a fundamental interest in the change of our relation to the forma-
tive institutional and conceptual contexts of our experience.
Our power to transform the nature of our contexts— or of our rela-
tion to them, rather than simply to substitute one set of arrangements
and assumptions for another, is, however, predicated on the truth of the
conception of the self lying at the center of this approach to the world.
Our enslavement to the structure is never so complete as to deny us, in
any domain of our experience, all the way from the institutions of soci-
ety and the procedures of thought to the vacillations of unspoken expe-
rience, the power to resist and to transcend the established arrange-
ments of thought and society.
Later in this chapter, I explore the implications of this view of self for
the conduct of life in two directions: the relation of self to structure and
the relation of the individual to other people. Before doing so, however,
I pause to consider how the metaphysical vision and the conception of
the self that I have just outlined relate to a momentous issue in the his-
tory of thought: whether there is more than one order of reality in the
world.Only one regime
Two calamities have befallen the struggle with the world in its encoun-
ter with philosophy.
Th e fi rst was the marriage of Christian (and, to a lesser extent of
Muslim and Jewish) theology to the Greek philosophy of being. Th e
consequences of this marriage for the understanding and development
of this approach to existence have been far- reaching. Th ey have set
their mark on its secular as well as on its sacred variants.
By the Greek philosophy of being I mean the part of the philosophi-
cal tradition of the ancient Greeks identifying the apprehension of a
permanent structure of being, complete with a permanent repertory of
natural kinds, as the central concern of metaphysics and thus as well as
the conceptual background to practical philosophy. We might call this
view of the program of metaphysics the project of classical ontology.