366 becoming more human by becoming more godlikeof structure- revision. This change in the character of ordinary
experience confirms and sustains the arousal to life that we may
achieve initially from our recognition of death, groundlessness, and
insatiability.
But what if such institutional arrangements, as well as the practices
that rely on them and that reproduce them, are missing? Th en certain
habitual dispositions to action— the virtues— must do the work that
would otherwise be done by practices and institutions. Po liti cal institu-
tions make po liti cal virtues not unnecessary but less necessary. We es-
tablish po liti cal institutions so that we can depend less on these virtues.
Th e same relation between our arrangements and our dispositions
reappears in the moral realm, beginning with its most important part:
the awareness and affi rmation of life. If we lack institutions and prac-
tices that diminish the distance between the reproduction and the revi-
sion of institutional and conceptual structures, then we must make up
for their absence by certain forms of action and of consciousness. Th ey
will always be important to our rise. In the absence of structures with
these attributes, however, they will become all the more vital. Without
them, we will be unable to keep what we acquired when we faced the
reality of our situation.
Virtue as self- transformation
With these preliminaries in mind, consider two complementary ac-
counts of the change in the conduct of life that the religion of the fu-
ture requires. One perspective takes the form of a doctrine of the
virtues. A second perspective is a conception of the course of exis-
tence: of the formative incidents by which we uphold or squander the
good of life.
A virtue is a habitual disposition to action. Th e legitimate role of
habit and repetition in our experience is to form a setting in which the
new becomes possible in that experience. As we are not to be enslaved
to the established regime of society and culture, so too we are not to be
imprisoned by the rigidifi ed form of the self, our character.
Th e aim, however, is not to wage war against all routine and repeti-
tion. Such a war would amount to a campaign against existence itself.