182 struggling with the worldthey only to a very limited extent; we remain weighted down by the
multiple forms of belittlement that our collective history has imposed
on us. We must make ourselves into such beings, step by step.
No one can hope to attain this goal within the limits of an individual
human life. It is a collective project of humanity, falling back or ad-
vancing, albeit fl awed and unfi nished, in historical time. From this fact
there results the momentous problem for the struggle with the world,
and most especially for its profane versions (the secular projects of lib-
eration), of the disparity between the historical time in which mankind
rises and stumbles and the biographical time in which the individual
lives and dies.
Criticism: strength and weakness
of the struggle with the world
No version, sacred or profane, of the struggle with the world has ever
been fully realized in society and culture. To the extent that it has come
close to being realized, in the eyes of its own followers, it has fi rst be-
trayed its central message. When the struggle with the world has not
been reduced in practice, it has been diminished in doctrine.
Th e characteristic mode of this doctrinal diminishment in the sa-
cred forms of the struggle with the world is legalism, especially in Juda-
ism and Islam. Obedience to the sacred law (the halakhah or the sharia)
substitutes for any wider attempt to reor ga nize society and to re orient
life in ways that cannot be brought under a legal and institutional
formula.
Th e typical manifestation of such a doctrinal diminishment in the
profane and po liti cal variants of the struggle with the world is the secu-
lar equivalent to reverence for sacred law: institutional fetishism—
identifi cation of the change that we seek with a dogmatic institutional
program. For the liberals and socialists of the nineteenth century, who
despite their institutional formulas saw beyond the narrow goal of equal-
ity to a larger vision of human empowerment, the institutional dogma
was explicit. In liberalism, it was a set of arrangements that were sup-
posed to be the necessary and suffi cient institutional requirements of a
free society. In state socialism, it was an idea of the displacement of the