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352 becoming more human by becoming more godlike

Down with a style of philosophizing that separates higher- order dis-

courses from fi rst- order proposals, and pays for its emptiness with its

sterility.

A fourth preliminary is to understand and to develop the suppressed
and misunderstood teachings of the struggle with the world about the
relation of spirit to structure and of self to others. Th ese teachings sug-
gest what the enhancement of life means, as well as what it requires by
way of our activity in the world.
All the religions of transcendence, each in its own way, insisted on
replacing the ethic of martial valor, of pride and self- assertion, dear to
the fi ghting and ruling classes of the great states of the past, with an
ethic of inclusive solidarity and fellow feeling. Th is substitution found
support in the denial of the reality or authority of all divisions within
mankind. Such was the truth proclaimed in Buddhism and Confu-
cianism as well as in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Th e moral phi-
los o phers, with their emphasis on ethical universalism, maintain this
focus, in the bloodless and lifeless mode of the fake contest among their
meta- theories.
It was the distinctive achievement of the struggle with the world, in
all its theistic and secular forms, especially Christianity, democracy, and
romanticism, to have subordinated this ethical universalism to another
moral vision: one in which our ability to imagine and to accept one an-
other (in love and in the higher forms of cooperation) and our capacity
to see and act beyond the limits of the established structures of life and
thought become the commanding impulses. Th is vision remains sur-
rounded and compromised, in the or ga nized religions and the estab-
lished social orders, by beliefs, practices, and institutions that contradict
its insights and defeat its intentions. Once we set out to confront and to
overcome these obstacles, we are ready for a revolution in our beliefs.
Th e crucial element in the turn taken by the struggle with the world
is the marriage of our ideas about connection and cooperation with our
ideas about the longing for the infi nite: the striving for the insights and
the powers that are denied to us by the limiting structures of life and of
thought that we must inhabit. Th e quest for such insights and powers in
turn leads to the decisive concern with the path to a greater existence.
Th is path must be founded on the recognition rather than on the denial