166 struggling with the worldspirit we mean humanity in the exercise of its power of re sis tance
and transcendence— lives by shaking structure.
Structures, in this view, are unavoidable. We cannot abolish them.
All we can do is to loosen, for a while, their hold. Th ey will reassert them-
selves. Nevertheless, in the intervals of disturbance, we can become more
fully ourselves.
In the moral history of Western culture, the most familiar form of
this idea is the one presented, long before Sartre and the twentieth-
century existentialists, by nineteenth- century romanticism. Th e spirit
fl oats above the world, powerless to penetrate and to transform the rou-
tines and repetitions that consume much of our existence. Th e trials of
the protagonist in struggling for the hand of his beloved command atten-
tion. His subsequent married life, however, defi es appealing portrayal,
marked as it must be by the repetition and routine that romanticism
regards as deadly to spirit.
A crucial feature of the Sartrean heresy is its implicit denial of our
ability to change the relation of spirit to structure. In the fragmentary
and oblique ways in which it exercises its greatest infl uence, the Hege-
lian heresy favors an institutional fetishism: the unargued identifi ca-
tion of abstract institutional conceptions, like the conceptions of a
market economy, a representative democracy, or an in de pen dent civil
society, with par tic u lar, contingent sets of institutional arrangements,
defi ned in law.
Th e Sartrean heresy makes an analogous mistake at a higher level. It
treats the relation of the self to the social and conceptual regimes that
we inhabit as a fi xed quantity. It fails to acknowledge what is a fact of
the matter: that every or ga nized form of social life or of inquiry and
discourse can be arranged so as to either lengthen or shorten the distance
between our context- preserving and our context- changing moves.
Each such form can be established in ways that either affi rm or renounce
the pretense to be a natural fact, part of the furniture of the universe, or
at least of all history, rather than a revisable human invention. Our
most fundamental material, moral, and spiritual interests, however, are
engaged in precisely such a change in the character of our relation to
the established framework of society or of thought.
In the sacred language of the struggle with the world, the Sartrean
heresy commits a sin of despair that is the reverse side of a sin of idola-