becoming more human by becoming more godlike 365
•••
Ideas and stories are not enough to ensure that we will awake from the
daze of a diminished existence to possess life in the full. To achieve this
goal, we must supplement them either by practices that society and
culture establish or by virtues that make up for their absence.
Th e German soldiers who carried Heidegger’s Being and Time around
with them in the First World War did not need the ideas of that phi los-
o pher to lift themselves from the sleepwalking of everyday experience.
Th ey had war to remind them at every moment that they were death-
bound. Th e words on the page mattered for a few because they seemed
to give voice to an experience of terror that many experienced without
having read them.
How are we so to shape our experience that we no longer require the
devotions of war— or of any other limiting and terrifying experience—
to come to life? Society and culture must be so or ga nized that they di-
minish the distance between the ordinary moves that we make within
an institutional or ideological framework that we take for granted and
the exceptional moves by which we challenge and change pieces of that
framework. Our normal science, for example, must acquire some of the
features of revolutionary science. Our education must be designed to
school the mind in ideas and visions remote from those that prevail in
the established culture and to free it from passivity and subservience by
exposing it, at every turn, to contrasting points of view. Our democra-
cies must be arranged in ways that increase the temperature of politics
(that is, the level of or ga nized pop u lar engagement in po liti cal life) and
hasten its pace (that is, the ability to break deadlock and bring about
structural reform), diminishing the dependence of change upon crisis.
Our market economies must favor an or ga ni za tion of work by which
tasks are redefi ned in the course of being executed and an or ga ni za tion
of the market economy in which we are free to innovate in the arrange-
ments of production and exchange as well as in combinations of people,
technologies, and capital.
In these ways, and in many like them, we move toward the cre-
ation of structures that impart to our ordinary experience the quali-
ties that we are accustomed to see only in our exceptional experiences