108 humanizing the worldTh e premise of this devotion is our ability to understand the experi-
ence of others. Imagination— the imagination of their inner life and
aspirations— informs our eff orts to minister to their needs. It does so
on the basis of the social roles that each of us performs.
Th e affi rmation of the sanctity of the personal (or, more precisely, of
the interpersonal) is not peculiar to Confucianism; it is a trait of all the
many versions of the humanization of the world that have appeared in
the course of the religious history of humanity. Even in our partly
Christianized culture, it is captured by a conception that exerts a wide
infl uence today: the view of intimate encounter as a domain of the pri-
vate sublime, in which we can accept the instrumental calculus of
interests and effi ciencies only insofar as such calculation serves an ex-
perience beyond instrumental concerns.
To form part of a naturalistic account of our powers of transcen-
dence, the idea of the sanctity of personality and of personal encounter
must be combined with an iconoclastic attitude to the institutional and
ideological settings in which personal experience takes place. However,
it cannot be so combined without accommodating a conception of the
self that is foreign to it and that takes our moral and po liti cal imagina-
tion in a completely diff erent direction. Th is conception is the idea of
a human being as embodied spirit, an idea that has been central (as I
later argue) to the tradition of the struggle with the world, in its profane
as well as its sacred registers.
According to this idea, there is more in us, in each of us individually
as well as in all of us collectively, than there is or ever can be in the so-
cial and conceptual regimes that we inhabit. Although they shape us,
we exceed them. Our transcendence over context is expressed in the
idea, central to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, that we already share
in the attributes of God. We can increase our share in these attributes
thanks to the partnership between divine redemption and human
striving.
Belief in our transcendence over context may take— and in much of
the world does take— a purely secular form, presupposing no faith in a
narrative of dealings between God and humanity. Such secular creeds
may speak to the self and the mind, or to society and its transformation.
However, even when they deal with the personal, they also address the
po liti cal. When they neglect to connect ideas about the self and the