becoming more human by becoming more godlike 411machine in the development of our powers is to undertake on our be-
half the work that we have learned how to repeat so that we can pre-
serve our greatest and, in a sense, our sole resource— the time of our
lives— for that which we have learned how not to repeat. By increasing
the role of the non- repetitious in our experience, we become more hu-
man by becoming more godlike. Putting repetition in its place is asso-
ciated with breaking the spell that condemns us to a smaller life.
A formative feature of music is movement from repetition to novelty.
Repetition is heard as consonance and departure from repetition as
dissonance. If music were solely or even primarily repetition, it too
would be a spell, resembling hypnosis, bewitching us into a dimmed
state of awareness as we await death. A style in music, such as the clas-
sical style of the period of Eu ro pe an music from about 1770 to 1820, is,
in the fi rst instance, a par tic u lar way of managing the coexistence be-
tween consonance and dissonance. Th e enhancement of our power to
appreciate dissonance and to expand our sense of what counts as con-
sonance is, if anything is, the rule of progression in the history of musi-
cal style. In this way, the development of our musical faculties joins the
project of the divinization of humanity.
So, too, with the virtues: as habitual dispositions, they rely on repeti-
tion. Nevertheless, the role of openness to the new among the virtues of
divinization and its connection with openness to the other person sug-
gest that repetition acquires its value only through its link with the
unrepeated.
Th e psychological signifi cance of non- repetition is the sharpening of
consciousness, including our awareness of the passage of time, in a hu-
man life that moves decisively and irreversibly to its end. Repetition is
the anticipation of death if it remains in command of experience. It is
the friend of life if it lays a basis for the unrepeated.
Th e second principle is the importance of the eff ort to change the
nature of repetition as well as harnessing it to the aim of widening
space for that which we have not yet learned how to repeat readily. I
have described what this change in the nature of repetition means for
the institutional or ga ni za tion of society: a structure that facilitates its
own revision, multiplying occasions and creating instruments for its
piecemeal reshaping. Such a way of or ga niz ing the market economy,
the demo cratic state, or in de pen dent civil society narrows the distance