struggling with the world 155
God’s intervention disturbs both the workings of nature and the order
of humanity.
Moreover, nothing has been gained by the dualism to render super-
naturalism any less off ensive to human reason. Th ere are now three
miracles instead of one: the suspension of the workings of the natural
order, the suspension of the workings of the human order, and the ex-
ception that the human order represents within the natural one.
Th e supernaturalism of the Semitic salvation religions off ers no ex-
cuse for the anti- naturalism of the two regimes: the supernatural is, for
these religions, not the opposite of the natural. Th e conception of em-
bodied spirit, of the incarnation of spirit, requires the believer to reject
as heretical the rigid separation of fl esh and spirit, of nature and mind,
to which the thesis of the two regimes is wedded.
Th e argument about near emptiness and false content. A second objec-
tion to the doctrine of the two regimes is that when it is not almost empty
as a guide to our orientation in the world, it acquires content only in a
form that is false to our relation to the social and conceptual contexts
in which we move. Th e signifi cance of this objection becomes clear in
the relation between the Kantian and the historicist forms of the doc-
trine of the two regimes. Th e juxtaposition of these two ways of stating
the idea of the two regimes has been, for over a century, a characteristic
feature of prevailing forms of thought.
Taken at its word, the Kantian view provides only the barest, most
minimal basis for moral and po liti cal action. Th e constraint of univer-
sality in the categorical imperative and the formula of treating others
as ends rather than as means lack defi nite content. Th e abstract idea of
human freedom, lost or suspended in a natural setting constituted on
principles that contradict it, yields nothing but itself. What it does is to
provide one way among many of affi rming an ideal of universal altru-
ism as the or ga niz ing principle of the moral life.
However, this principle of altruism, far from being self- evident, is in
fact misguided. It is false (as I later argue) to the truth about the rela-
tion between self and others as well as to the insights and aspirations
driving the struggle with the world. It disregards what is in fact the
central problem in our moral experience: our contradictory need for
one another and our need to protect ourselves against the jeopardy in