136 struggling with the worldnot it can count on the saving work of a transcendent God, is one with the
potential to corrode and to dissolve all established hierarchies— social,
moral, and aesthetic— that make our most valuable powers and experi-
ences seem the prerogative of a few rather than the possession of all.
Th us comes the tremendous inversion of values that leads in the
narratives of salvation to the preference for the prostitutes over the
Pharisees, in our social ideas to the conviction that the mass of proper-
tyless and powerless workers are the most credible bearers of the uni-
versal interests of humanity, and in our attitudes to art to the confusion
of genres and to the conviction that comedy is higher than tragedy: that
it is truer because more suggestive of transformative opportunity.
Th e resulting form of moral consciousness teaches us that it is better
to look for trouble than to stay out of trouble; that our raising up begins
in a willed ac cep tance of heightened vulnerability to disappointment,
disillusionment, and defeat; that in throwing down our shields, we re-
gain the fi rst condition of vitality; and that no standard of moral or
aesthetic judgment that accepts the hierarchies of the social order de-
serves anything other than suspicion and re sis tance.
We have only to survey the fossilized forms of or ga nized religion
and the conventional secular humanism to see how little this reversal
of values has been able to disturb the conventional moral beliefs that
continue to provide societies with much of their cement. No philo-
sophical doctrine has elucidated and developed the meaning of this
theme in the metaphysical background of the struggle with the world.
Th e only modern phi los o pher to have made the idea of the inversion of
values a central concern of his thought— Friedrich Nietzsche— was the
one most determined to resist the raising of the base over the noble. He
denounced it as ressentiment, mistaking its shadows, ambivalences,
and contradictions for its commanding impulse.
Conception of the self
Th is vision of the world and of our place in it creates the context of be-
lief that gives meaning to our ascent. It is not, however, the centerpiece
of what the sacred and the profane versions of the struggle with the
world have in common. Th is shared core is a conception of the self and