192 struggling with the worldTh is crypto- metaphysical project is the limiting rather than the
normal form of belated paganism. Th e normal form is the euphoric or
desperate retreat into the small delights of private experiences: small
enough not to remind us of who we are.
Either of these escapes from the experience of estrangement rests on
a lie about us. Our transcendence over circumstance in a natural and
social world that has a defi nite structure, although a changing one, is
not an option; it is a fact about nature, society, and humanity. In deny-
ing it, we deny ourselves and give up our birthright of radical freedom.
Th e practical consequence of this self- diminishment is to overcome
our ambivalence to the present moment only by undermining a ten-
sion that is central to our experience of the present as well as to a truth
about who we are. To be wide awake and alive in the present moment,
and fully attentive to the present experience, we must be able to partici-
pate in an established form of life without surrendering to it, to see it
from the vantage of its accessible transformations, to compare it to
analogous circumstances, and above all to defy it in thought and in
practice, to resist it and revise it. It is only by this coming and going
that we make it ours.
Th e work of the imagination reveals the signifi cance of the dialectic
between engagement in context and re sis tance to context for our ability
to overcome estrangement from the present moment. Th e two recur-
rent moves of the imagination— distancing from the object (recollect-
ing perception as image) and transformative variation (grasping a state
of aff airs by reference to what it might next become)— represent re-
quirements of insight into any part of the manifest world. Th ey prevent
vision from degenerating into staring, and break the spell that the phe-
nomenon can cast over the mind.
Th e paradox of imaginative insight is to expand our access to the pres-
ent moment by removing us from it. By its two- step work, the imagina-
tion holds the phenomenon away the better to come close to it, and puts
it through a ring of actual or hypothetical changes the better to grasp
its hidden workings. Aroused by the two- stage struggle, consciousness
rises and sharpens. To the extent that we become fully aware, we are
more fully alive.
What the example of the imagination shows is that the source of es-
trangement from the present moment is not the dialectic of transcen-