becoming more human by becoming more godlike 435
surplus of experience and of power that they can never either accept or
entirely suppress.
It is therefore in our interest to change the character of these struc-
tures and of our relation to them, so that we not be faced with a stark
choice between disengagement and surrender. We want regimes of life
and thought so to facilitate their own correction in the light of experi-
ence that the diff erence between being inside them and being outside
them diminishes, and the distance between the activities that take them
for granted and the activities that revise them narrows. Such a change
is both a collective project advanced in historical time and a personal
endeavor pursued in biographical time.
As a collective eff ort, it requires changes in the institutions and
practices of society as well as in the methods of every department of
thought. As a personal endeavor, it demands a way of living: the way of
living marked by the characteristics explored in these pages. Th e less
we have advanced in the collective project, the greater is the burden
placed on the personal endeavor.
Th is, however, is not the whole story of the conditions of our upward
movement. It is a lopsided version of that story in which our depen-
dence upon other people and the ties of solidarity and of ambivalence
that bind us to them appear only incidentally. As the criticism of moral
vision in the tradition of the struggle with the world has shown, the
problem of self and others lies at the same level of importance and cen-
trality as the problem of spirit and structure. Th e adequacy of our re-
sponse to one turns, in part, on the adequacy of our response to the
other, through collective undertakings in historical time and personal
endeavors in biographical time.
Here is where the break with the theoretical altruism of the moral
phi los o phers becomes decisive and where the kinship of the religion of
the future with the sacred and profane variants of the struggle with the
world becomes most palpable. To make a self, the individual must come
to terms with others. In every domain of experience, from practice to
passion to knowledge, there is no self- construction without personal
connection but no personal connection that is not beset by the ever-
present risk of injury to self- construction.
Th is injury takes two main forms. Th e fi rst is our entanglement in a
structure of power and subjugation. Th e second is the conformity of the