410 becoming more human by becoming more godlikeA second moment in the war against repetition occurs with the
romantic movement of the nineteenth century and its late- romantic
sequels. Now all repetition, whether institutional, conceptual, or char-
acterological, is seen as both inevitable and destructive of spirit, if by
spirit we mean those of our powers that no such structures of society,
thought, or character can exhaust. Th e romantic is resigned to the re-
current and per sis tent reaffi rmation of the structures. He despairs of
our ability permanently to alter our relation to them by changing their
quality as well as their content. He nevertheless believes that we can
periodically shake their hold— through pop u lar insurrection, irratio-
nalist thought, romantic love, and reckless adventure. It is only in these
intervals that, according to the romantic, we truly and fully live.
Th e existentialist moment arrives when to these themes is added
disbelief in the unity of the self or in the value of a unitary self. Th e
agent of the rebellion against structure ceases to be the self as spirit,
in the exercise of its structure- defying powers, and becomes instead
the person in his temporal situation, identifi ed with his fl eeting
experience.
In all its three moments, this view betrays its failure to grasp a major
aspect of our condition: our ability to turn the tables on the structures
not just by rebelling against them but by rendering them more open to
the powers by which we resist and reshape them. We can do justice to
these powers without subscribing to the Hegelian heresy: belief in the
existence of a structure that accommodates all the experience that we
have reason to value, whether in society, thought, or character.
Rightly to deal with the pervasive presence of repetition in our expe-
rience, we must make explicit and radicalize the suppressed orthodoxy
of spirit and structure in the struggle with the world. Th ree principles
reveal the implications of this orthodoxy for our response to the role of
repetition in experience.
Th e fi rst principle is that repetition be used to escape from repeti-
tion. Consider two widely contrasting instances of this principle: the
desirable relation of the machine to labor and the relation of consonance
to dissonance in music.
What ever we have learned how to repeat we can express in a for-
mula. What ever we have learned how to express formulaically we can
embody in a physical contraption, a machine. Th e highest use of the