86 overcoming the world
and provoked to reconsider and to revise the order as we go about our
daily business within it. As a result, we shall be able to say to a greater
extent that we can both engage par tic u lar social and conceptual re-
gimes and go beyond them. In the old theological language, we can
describe ourselves as being in such a world without being of it.
In another description, change will become less dependent on crisis.
In society, crisis takes the form of an exogenous shock, such as war or
ruin. In thought, it appears as an accumulation of facts that cannot be
accommodated within an established theory or discourse. Th e less a
social or conceptual order is designed to open itself up to experimental
challenge and revision, the more it will require crisis as the midwife of
change. It will break before it bends.
Our stake in bringing about such a change is intimately related to
some of our most powerful material and moral interests. It is also as-
sociated with the development of our practical capabilities of produc-
tion through the radicalization of the freedom to recombine people,
resources, and machines. It is connected as well to overcoming the forms
of social hierarchy and division that hold our relations to one another
ransom. Moreover, it is itself, apart from its causal connections with
these moral and material interests, the bearer of a spiritual interest: our
success in addressing the last of the irremediable fl aws in human exis-
tence, evoked at the beginning of this book. By transforming, in this way,
the character of our relation to the limiting contexts of our existence, we
lighten, although we cannot lift , the burden of belittlement: the dispro-
portion between our circumstances and our circumstance- transcending
nature.
Progress toward this end takes place in historical time. However, we
live in biographical time. What good will it do us if we happen to have
been born before this collective work of the ascent of the spirit? Are we
condemned to be exiles in worlds of which we are both the builders and
the prisoners? We can hope to foreshadow in biographical time what
would otherwise be available only in historical time.
We can do so in one way by developing with respect to our character—
the rigidifi ed form of a self— an approach analogous to the relation that
humanity has reason to develop with regard to the or ga nized forms of
society and of thought. We break out of the carapace of compromise