becoming more human by becoming more godlike 405
Goethe remarked that there was no crime he might not have com-
mitted with slight variations of circumstance. So do we fi nd ourselves
all with regard to our fellows once we come to recognize the eff ect of
our inescapable mutilation upon our shared humanity.
Even the answer that the imagination can give to mutilation de-
pends, for its force, on society. It depends, above all, on the success of
education in developing our capacity to imagine the subjective experi-
ence of other people, in other times and situations. In poetry, in the
novel, and in the study of the historical vicissitudes of forms of life and
of consciousness, we enhance our capacity to appreciate the diversity of
human experience. We come to grasp the truth that mankind develops
its powers by developing them in diff erent directions, expressed in dis-
tinct institutional regimes.
Th e course of life: mummifi cation
Another decisive incident in human life is our habitual surrender to the
routines of our social circumstance as well as to the hardened version
of our self: the character. Character and circumstance come together.
As we grow older, they form around each of us a mummy, within which
we die many small deaths. To this diminishment of life we may give the
name mummifi cation. Th e threat of this two- sided surrender is so reg-
ularly realized that it forms as constant and as decisive an incident in
human life as the mutilation I previously discussed. We cannot ascend,
affi rming the good of life and increasing our share in some of the at-
tributes that we ascribe to the divine, unless we avert this threat.
Mummifi cation has two diff erent sides. It is crucial to understand
the relation between them if we are to defeat this evil and come more
fully into the possession of life.
One side of mummifi cation is our surrender to routinized role and
practice within a par tic u lar social circumstance. Within such a cir-
cumstance, a person assumes a series of roles. Each role comes com-
plete with a built- in script, instructing him how to speak, feel, and act.
He embraces and performs this role within a part of social life that is
shaped by a dense net of claims that others make on him and he on
others.