348 becoming more human by becoming more godlike
and the confl ict between the imperative of connection to other people
(which fi nds its consummate forms in personal love and the higher
forms of cooperation) and our striving to escape subjugation and loss
of the sentiment of self and of the power of self- direction. As the his-
tory of politics is internal to the history of the mind, so too is it internal
to the history of every major aspect of existence.
All of our experience, not just a part of it, is on the line in history.
Every form of life, institutionalized in society and conceptualized in
culture, tilts the scales, encouraging the expression and development of
some varieties of experience while inhibiting others. Nevertheless, we
are not a plastic mass of revisable dispositions, freely open to radical
re- engineering by transformative po liti cal and moral projects. We change,
with diffi culty, over time and at the margins. As the poet writes, we
would rather be ruined than changed.
Given these contrasting features of the relation of human nature to
history, we can safely understand human nature only as what we are
like now, or have been, individually and collectively, and as what we
might next become, in the penumbra of the adjacent possible, thanks to
our eff orts to change both ourselves and society.
We are, to return to the central idea of the self as context- shaped but
nevertheless context- revising and context- transcending spirit, incapa-
ble of being reduced entirely to the regime of society or of thought in
which we happen to fi nd ourselves placed. Th e next incongruous expe-
rience, or rebellious thought, or transformative albeit unintended ex-
periment may put paid to the pretense of that regime, of its votaries and
apologists, to circumscribe the perimeter of our powers. Th e regime may
be or ga nized to suppress this residual capability of ours: by widening the
distance between our regime- preserving and our regime- reforming
moves, thus making change depend on crisis and strengthening the do-
minion of the dead over the living. However, such suppression will never
be complete: the power to see, think, feel, act, connect, produce, and
or ga nize in ways that the present order of society or of thought fails to
countenance will remain, if only as a residue. Th e residue may then be
hailed as a prophecy and taken as a road.
It follows, with respect to society, that normative argument need
never be solely contextual or internal, judging a regime by its own stan-