398 becoming more human by becoming more godlikeEach of us must then determine how he is to live in society in such a
way that his existence does not come to represent a denial and subver-
sion of his nature as context- transcending spirit. In this pursuit, he
faces a third decisive incident in the normal course of existence. He
cannot be anything or everything, anyone, or everyone. He must be-
come someone in par tic u lar. To become someone in par tic u lar, he
must renounce many other forms of humanity that might become his.
Hegel remarks that the characteristic predicament of the adolescent is
“to be lost in particularity,” that is to say, in the formless riches of exis-
tence and of society. We might better describe his quandary, however,
as being lost in universality: a universality of experience that fails to
assume the form of a par tic u lar and relatively exclusive direction of
activity.
Th is imperative of ceasing to be many things in order to become one
thing, of abandoning many possibilities of existence the better to develop
one, is a mutilation. We face this mutilation in two major variations: the
need to develop, or to accept, a course of life and the requirement to oc-
cupy, or to embrace, a station in society. A course of life and a station in
society are so closely linked that it may be hard do distinguish between
them. Nevertheless, they present us with the problem of mutilation in
diff erent registers. Th e course of life has to do with the trajectory of an
existence, beginning in the dreams of youth and ending in death, and
with the relation of that trajectory to our understanding of ourselves
and of others. Th e social station is the position that we assume in the
division of labor in society. It raises the problem of our mutilation in
the form of the relation between our inner and our outer worlds: be-
tween our idea of ourselves as godlike and our continuing experience
of belittlement.
It is by a certain response to this confl ict that we deal with the muti-
lation of our many- sidedness. By this response, we affi rm our two- sided
nature as engaged and resistant. We move closer to living as the em-
bodied spirits that we are.
Th e radical simplifi cations and exclusions of a course of life and of a
social station threaten to reduce the universal in us to the par tic u lar,
or to leave the universal as a spirit— of resentment and regret— fl oating
over the unchanged realities of an individual existence and of its place
in society. Our mutilation brings us the message and the reality of our