becoming more human by becoming more godlike 441regard to the institutional materials and ideas that are currently avail-
able or accessible, through a discernible succession of steps, given the
place at which we now fi nd ourselves. Th is is the doctrine for which I
have argued under the name deep freedom. In opposition to the po liti-
cal ideas that have most recently guided ideological controversy
around the world, but similarly to those that used to infl uence such
debate in the nineteenth century, it combines a devotion to the em-
powerment of the ordinary person— a raising up of ordinary life to a
higher plane of intensity, scope, and capability— with a disposition to
reshape the institutional arrangements of society in the ser vice of
such empowerment.
Th is view denies that the cause of economic, po liti cal, and social plu-
ralism is adequately served by the institutions that now stand as expres-
sions of the market economy, of representative democracy, and of in de-
pen dent civil society. It proposes a trajectory of institutional change
designed to support what it describes as the higher forms of cooperation.
More than any par tic u lar way of or ga niz ing society, what it wants is to
establish a structure that redeems its unavoidable partiality— its tilt-
ing toward some forms of experience and against others— through its
strengthened corrigibility. It does not try to describe a defi nitive struc-
ture; it proposes movement toward a structure that organizes its own re-
vision. It does not demand surrender as the price of engagement or turn
crisis into the condition of change. It provides us with a secular approxi-
mation to the ideal of being in the world without being of it.
Th e reshaping of society amounts to an indispensable part of the
program of a religion of the future because history matters. What ever
our view of the road to our ascent may be, it must be expressed in the
terms of our relations to one another, not just the way in which we
choose to deal with other people in the small coin of personal encoun-
ter but also the way in which society is or ga nized in the large currency
of its institutions and practices. All our conceptions of who we are and
of what we can become remain fastened to those practices and institu-
tions. It is only by ambitious and per sis tent striving and with the guid-
ance of a view opposing the enacted images of human association that
we manage to make up, in personal experience, for the limitations of
the social regime. Th at is what each of us must seek to do, according to
his circumstance, given the discrepancy between the span of our lives