400 becoming more human by becoming more godlike
thought. Th ey demand, on account of their totalizing ambitions, unre-
lenting engagement of our faculties and energies.
Philosophy and politics, however, off er no such rescue. In the fi rst
place, they deal with everything only in their regulative ideal, not in
their historical practice and presence. Th ose who call themselves phi-
los o phers are for the most part professors of philosophy, specialists
in an intellectual practice that deals with a path- dependent agenda,
shaped by the history of par tic u lar philosophical traditions even when
it does not abase itself to the work of a thought police. Politicians are
generally professional offi ce seekers and offi ce holders, and specialists,
for their part, in the repre sen ta tion of par tic u lar interests and aspira-
tions, within the conventions of a given po liti cal system.
Only a reinvented philosophy, understood and pursued as the mind
at war against all disciplinary and methodological restraint, would ful-
fi ll that ideal. Today, however, it is an ideal that can be approached,
to the extent that it can be approached at all, from the starting point
of any discipline or discourse. It cannot be enacted in the form of a
philosophical super- science, towering above the specialized modes of
inquiry.
Only a transformative politics, free from the illusions of necessitar-
ian social theories and unwilling to accept crisis as the condition of
change, could realize this ideal in po liti cal life. Such a politics is today a
project more than it is a practice. It is a project that we can undertake in
every domain of social life, not just in the contest over winning and us-
ing governmental power.
In the second place, even when philosophy and politics move to-
ward the ideal of dealing with everything (or with the formative and
fundamental) rather than with something in par tic u lar, they remain
separated from each other. Th at separation is itself a form of mutila-
tion. Hegel was able to conceive the union of a life of thought (as phi-
losophy) and of action (as politics) only in the dream of the imaginary
duo of the phi los o pher with Napoleon. Th us, the marriage of philoso-
phy to revolutionary tyranny became, as it has so oft en been in the
history of philosophy, the imaginary shortcut to an idealized but un-
consummated marriage. Th e union of philosophy with politics can-
not be the source of a greater life. It must at best be one of its many
consequences. Its fragmentary realization in the lives of individuals