struggling with the world 157Th e normal form of moral and po liti cal argument is indeed contex-
tual, much as the historicists claim. We may tinker with our institutions
and practices the better to realize some understanding of our interests
and ideals. However, as we dissolve the forced marriage between that
structure and these conceptions, we have to confront, and to resolve,
ambiguities in these ideas that remained hidden to us so long as that
marriage was left unchallenged.
Contrary to what the historicists suppose, this contextual style of
discourse fails to exhaust the resources of normative argument, or of
our relation to our contexts. We can act and think in ways defying the
context. Contextual argument can be disturbed by context- resisting
and context- transcending vision. Th us arises the prophetic element in
our normative practices. Its characteristic content, apart from divine
revelation, is the appeal to a conception of who we are and of what we
can become.
Such conceptions of humanity amount to self- fulfi lling prophecies:
by acting at their behest, we begin to remake the world. However, they
are never completely self- fulfi lling: reality, especially our reality, fi ghts
back. Th e world resists, and we resist, being changed.
We should not regard accounts of humanity by analogy to explana-
tions provided by science. Visions of humanity do not resemble, for ex-
ample, models of the atomic structure of part of nature. Th ey neverthe-
less have an empirical element. Th ey are embedded in, or connected
with, conjectures about the relative force of our longings or the limits, at
any given moment, to our self- transformation, both as individuals and
as collectivities.
Th ese empirical elements remain fragmentary; they fail to prevent
such guiding beliefs about who we are and can become from being
contestable. Yet we must commit ourselves in one direction or another,
without having for such a commitment a basis that can be adequate to
the gravity of the choice. Th e imbalance between the weight of the
choice and the fragility of its grounding confi rms the religious aspect
of our choice among orientations to existence.
Th ese observations suggest a way of thinking about our relation to
our contexts at odds with the combination of Kantianism and histori-
cism that has long been the most infl uential form of the doctrine of the
two regimes. Later in this chapter, I argue that this way of thinking about
the relation of spirit to structure represents part of the undeveloped