struggling with the world 167try. Despair and idolatry speak through the illusions of false necessity,
applied to the relation of self to context, of spirit to structure. Th e harm
done to the understanding is the severing of the link between insight
into the actual— the established structures— and imagination of the ac-
cessible alternatives: the theres to which we can get from here. Th e
harm infl icted on the will is the failure to transform an aspect of soci-
ety and thought— the relation of our institutional or conceptual presup-
positions to our experience— that, left unchanged, limits and corrupts
our most ambitious endeavors.
Th e Sartrean heresy has taken many forms in the history of thought:
in the via negativa of the mystical traditions within Judaism, Christian-
ity, and Islam; in the ideal of life developed by the romantic movement
of the nineteenth century; and in the vitalist and existentialist currents
in the philosophy of the twentieth century, which, in some ways, com-
bined the impulses of those two earlier stages of the heresy. Th ese be-
liefs are no longer the most widespread and infl uential expression of
the Sartrean heresy today. Now this heresy appears, more commonly
and insidiously, in the form of a complete disjunction between the re-
construction of society or of thought and the re orientation of personal
life. One of the results of this divide is the privatization of the sublime
as religion, as art, or as wordless experience.
Th e orthodoxy of the struggle with the world is the doctrine that
remains once we have repudiated both the Hegelian and the Sartrean
heresies. In its essential elements, this orthodoxy can be embraced by
the believer and unbeliever alike. It is closely related to the vision of the
dialectic between circumstance and transcendence. What it adds to this
vision is a series of connected ideas about the character and the trans-
formability of the social and mental worlds in which we live and move.
Th ere is no fi nal and all- inclusive ordering of social life, much less a
form of insight and discourse satisfying the criteria of absolute knowl-
edge. Every regime of society or of thought remains defective and in-
complete. So, as well, is the sum or sequence of all such structures.
Th ere will always be insights, experiments, and experiences that we
have reason to value but that the established arrangements and as-
sumptions exclude. We can nevertheless reach beyond the regime to
what it would deny us. We can revise the defective or incomplete order,
making it less defective or less incomplete.