struggling with the world 163sented much more than a doctrine taught by individual thinkers; each
has amounted to a per sis tent tendency in the intellectual history of the
societies in which the sacred and profane projects of the struggle with
the world have commanded the greatest authority. To this day, it re-
mains unclear what is left of the view of the relation between spirit and
structure in this approach to existence when both these heresies are
rejected. Much is in fact left , although not yet adequately developed in
our ideas about self and society.
Th e doctrine of the Hegelian heresy is that there can be a defi nitive
structure of social life and self- understanding. Such a structure will
emerge, if it has not already done so. It does justice to all the experi-
ences that we have reason to value and denies no power that we have
reason to enhance. It suff ers from no fatal contradiction, in par tic u-
lar no contradiction between the institutionalized form of the life of
the people, established as law, and the prescriptive, action- oriented
beliefs— the ideals and the interests— in the light of which we under-
stand and uphold the institutional regime. Insofar as we can have a
home in the world, such a defi nitive structure is that home. With its
emergence, we lose a reason to be restless in the world.
In the version of this view developed by Hegel himself as well as by
many other ideologists of the upward path, through confl ict and con-
tradiction, that humanity is supposedly treading, the defi nitive order
represents a collective construction in historical time. Th e sacred ver-
sions of the struggle with the world, however, embrace a wholly diff er-
ent species of such an order: one shaping social life according to the
dictates of sacred law. (Th e reconstruction of society according to the
requirements of the sharia in Islam fi gures as a telling example.) It
too amounts to an undertaking achieved in historical time, thanks to
a response of human will to God’s saving work.
Th e idea of a defi nitive structure of human life lays itself open to
derision only when formulated in explicit and unforgiving form. It is,
however, the unacknowledged premise of the now dominant expres-
sions of social- scientifi c explanation, of normative po liti cal philosophy,
and of the humanities. By abandoning any attempt to imagine the in-
fl uence and remaking of the structures, the prevailing ideas in the whole
fi eld of social and historical study sever the link between insight into
what exists in society and imagination of what we can make happen.