becoming more human by becoming more godlike 367It would aggravate our alienation from the present rather than over-
coming this estrangement. We would be committing the mistake of the
romantics, and reenacting the Sartrean heresy about self and structure.
Th e point is to enlist repetition and routine in the ser vice of the power
of transcendence, just as the modular, formulaic, and machine- like as-
pects of the life of the mind help explain the work of the mind as imagi-
nation. It may even be the case that one of these habitual dispositions is
the enhancement of our power to envision and to enact the new, that is
to say the non- habitual.
A characteristic teaching in the tradition of moral philosophy that
we associate with the discourse of virtue (“virtue ethics”) is the impor-
tance of forming a character that is inclined to practice certain actions.
Character economizes on moral deliberation (a scarce resource), just as
po liti cal institutions economize on po liti cal deliberation as well as on
civic virtue or, indeed, on virtue altogether (equally scarce resources).
For any view that develops out of the struggle with the world, however,
including the view that I here call the religion of the future, character
becomes a questionable good: to be embraced and denied, or to be ac-
cepted in a novel and qualifi ed sense. Two things are fatal to the mind,
wrote Friedrich Schlegel: to have a system and not to have it. A charac-
ter is the system of a personality. It is fatal to our moral development to
have and not to have a character. It is fatal not to have a character be-
cause our transcendence over circumstance requires eff ective personal
agency, which in turn depends on a cohesive personality with a set of
recurrent dispositions, which is to say a character. It is fatal to have a
character because the rigidifi ed self works as enemy to the transform-
ing self.
Th e solution to this apparent dilemma is the equivalent in the or ga-
ni za tion of our moral experience to what a structure open to revision
and experiment represents in the or ga ni za tion of our social experience.
We should seek in our institutions and practices that they facilitate
their own revision, diminishing the distance between our structure-
preserving and our structure- revising moves and weakening, as a re-
sult, the dependence of change on crisis as well as the infl uence of the
past on the future. Such a structure- destroying structure deprives itself
of the aura of naturalness and necessity. It ceases to present itself to us
as an unchosen fate, as part of the way things are.