struggling with the world 189our present situation. Our present experience participates, according to
such claims, in the future good.
Each variant of the struggle with the world represents this participa-
tion in a distinct way. In Christianity, for example, it is the grace result-
ing from God’s redemptive intervention in history, especially through
his incarnation, as well as from his presence, renewed by the sacramen-
tal life of the Church. Such a doctrine is, however, an abstraction; its
translation into personal experience remains obscure. Even if taken at
its word, it never promises more than a foretaste of the good that beck-
ons to us from beyond the confi nes of our earthly existence.
If the good is a future or ga ni za tion of society, resulting from a series
of po liti cal contests and institutional innovations, we have little reason
to hope that we can share in it in the course of our lives. Struggle against
the established structure may engage us in ways of thinking and of act-
ing that already defy the present order and anticipate the future one.
Th e practice of transformative politics and of critical thought may be-
come in some mea sure (but in what mea sure?) the prophecy of the bet-
ter order and make us freer and greater right now. More generally, liv-
ing for the future may be understood and experienced as a way of living
in the present, as a being not wholly determined by the present circum-
stances of his existence.
Th e gap between doctrine and experience, as well as between the
prefi guring and the consummation, persists. If the struggle with the
world has any theme that is universal to all of its expressions, this theme
is the reign of the future. Th e passion of futurity is directly connected
with the core conception of the dialectic between circumstance and
transcendence.
Descartes deployed the resources of speculative thought to discover
an idea secure against doubt. No argument, however, can be as unques-
tionable as a feature of our situation in the world: the fact that all we ever
possess for sure is the present moment and our experience in time as a
continuous succession of present moments. Everything else that is not
the present moment we possess in an at best derivative and diminished
sense. Th e past, held in memory, and the future, of which we hope to have
a foretaste, arise for us only by extension or modulation of the present.
Th e experience of the succession of present moments is the experi-
ence of life. Any force— whether it is a fact of nature, a constraint of