becoming more human by becoming more godlike 403Th e extent to which advanced practices of productive experimentalism
and cooperation penetrate broad sectors of the economy and society
depends on the direction of institutional innovation, initially in the
relations between governments and fi rms and later in the regimes of
property and contract.
Th e second principle is that the use of technology be so arranged
that machines do for us everything that we have learned to repeat. We
express such discoveries in formulas that we can in turn embody in
machines. To the greatest extent possible, society helps us save our time
for that which we have not yet learned how to repeat. Th e non- formulaic
activities are both more likely and more worthy to arouse the passion-
ate engagement that provides a temporary reprieve from our mortality,
groundlessness, and insatiability. Th ey help ensure that this intensity
will remain untainted by the trance of repetition.
Th e third principle is that eco nom ical ly dependent wage labor grad-
ually give way to cooperation and self- employment as the predominant
forms of free labor. Th e contractual employment relation, with its inbuilt
confl ation of the requirements of coordination and the prerogatives of
property, fails to provide a setting hospitable to either the generaliza-
tion of experimentalist, fl exible production or of non- formulaic work.
Only when wage labor gives way to the combination of self- employment
and cooperation as the predominant regime of free work can the imag-
ination become more fully and for more people the model on which
our practical and productive activities are or ga nized.
In the absence of these changes, our experiences of abandonment to
all- absorbing activity risk remaining ecstatic anomalies: escapes and
diversions. Th eir moral and social signifi cance turns on their use as
points of departure for revisions of some aspect of the context in which
wholehearted and single- minded engagement takes place.
A third antidote to the belittling consequences of mutilation is the
development of our ability to imagine the selves that we might have
become: not just the selves that might have resulted from paths that we
foreswore but also those that, given our ge ne tic constitution or social
and historical fate, were always beyond our reach. In choosing a course
of life, we renounce many others. In renouncing them, we cease to be-
come the individuals that such courses of life would have shaped. We