368 becoming more human by becoming more godlikeBy changing the institutional and ideological order of social life in
this direction, we acquire a great benefi t: we can better advance in the
zone of intersection between the institutional conditions of our most
basic material and moral interests— the development of our practical
capabilities, both as individuals and as collectivities, and the freeing of
cooperation from the incubus of class society.
An analogous principle applies in the ordering of our moral experi-
ence. Th e hardening of a character denies each of the attributes of life:
its qualities of surfeit, fecundity, and spontaneity. It prevents us from
dying only once.
Th e solution, however, is not to be without a character, thus attempt-
ing to reject in the nature of a personality the dialectic between habit
and rebellion. It is to form a character distinguished by its openness
to experience and by its readiness to change. Such a character has the
mark of a patient and hopeful availability, safeguarding vitality rather
than strangling it. Th e power of transcendence, which is the condition
of spirit, enables us to imagine and to accept other people as more than
the products of a circumstance or as placeholders in a scheme of social
division and hierarchy. More generally, it allows us to counteract our
self- absorption and to receive, more widely and intensely, the impres-
sions of reality. It renders our vision more inclusive and universal. In so
doing, it off ers a kind of salvation.
One of the signs of success in the formation of such a character-
defying character is that we will become better able to surprise our-
selves as well as others. In society, the more revisable structure di-
minishes the force of path dependence, even as it makes trauma less
necessary to transformation. In the ordering of our moral experience,
the counterpart to this intensifi cation of vitality is that, subject to the
constraints of society and the decline of the body, we become better
able, at each moment of experience, to see and to do more than our
previous course of life seemed to hold out for our future.
Th e history of moral ideas in the West has rendered familiar the
meta phors of the voyage, the pilgrimage, and the adventure. To the
Christian mind, they gave some indication of how life in secular society
should be lived. For the romantic imagination, these same meta phors
took on the aspect of a war against repetition and structure and thus
against life itself, as it can be experienced over the course of an actual