188 struggling with the world
was rejected by most Jews as blasphemous. So would any such far-
reaching reformation of these religions and ideologies be likely to be
denounced by their followers as apostasy from their religious, po liti cal,
or moral faith.
Moreover, the radical reconstruction of this approach to the world
along the lines that I have proposed would change the experience and
self- consciousness of its agents. At each step of their advance, they
would go further in discovering their own powers. Th e familiar forms
of the struggle with the world place the supreme good in a future of
divine providence or historical change beyond the lifespan of the living
individual. Th ey accept a present from which this good remains largely
absent. Th is circumstance would no longer be tolerable to the followers
of this orientation. Th eir newfound orthodoxy would attract them to
greatness now, not just to greatness later. It would require them to rebel
against the arrangements and assumptions that belittle them.
Criticism: estrangement from life in the present
Th e struggle with the world remains the most promising point of de-
parture for our self- understanding as well as for our attempts to change
society and ourselves. Nevertheless, in all its contemporary forms, both
secular and sacred, it is radically defective. It must be remade or re-
placed. As always in our eff orts at self- reinvention, no clear distinction
can be made between reconstruction and replacement. We can possess
only what we renounce.
Under the aegis of the struggle with the world, our supreme good—
that which brings us closer to the divine, to the largest life, to the fullest
reality, to the greatest value— always lies in the future. Th e future in
which the highest good lies may be our salvation in a life beyond death.
Or it may be a future social order that restores us to ourselves and em-
powers us.
Either way, the future is the future. It is not our future: that is to say,
not the future of our mortal lives, lived in biographical time, and not
the only experience to which we can ever have full and immediate ac-
cess: the present moment. Every version of the struggle with the world
claims that our orientation to this future good changes immediately