becoming more human by becoming more godlike 399
belittlement. It consequently becomes a subject of major interest to the
religion of the future.
A course of life results most commonly from the cumulative eff ects
of individual decisions taken against the background of what may be
the unforgiving constraints of society. Th ese constraints distribute life
chances unequally in every society that has existed up to now. To this
day, every society has been a class society, using the family as the in-
strument for the unequal distribution of economic and educational
advantage. In no social order up to now has meritocracy been any-
thing more than a counterweight or a complement to the mechanisms
of class advantage. To the extent that meritocracy weakens those mech-
anisms, it does so only to strengthen the infl uence of the unequal natu-
ral endowments with which each of us is born.
Within these daunting constraints, the individual stumbles, half-
consciously, upon a direction, which begins to take shape, and to acquire
restrictive force, as he forsakes possibilities of action for the sake of a
given path. He may continue to conceive other lives and the possibilities
of experience accompanying them. Th rough heroic will, or by the play
of luck and misfortune, he may even occasionally succeed in changing
the course of his life.
One day, however, he begins to realize that the life he is living will be
the only life he will ever live. He may resign himself to this reality, con-
fi rming the reduction of the universal to the par tic u lar and the insult
to the condition of embodied spirit. He may dignify his course of life
through its association with a socially recognized form of labor (a craft
or honorable calling) and take delight in what ever opportunities for
profi ciency or virtuosity it provides. Or, unable to fi nd solace in either
of these alternatives, he may feel trapped. Th e sentiment of entrapment
is one of the characteristic experiences attending the mutilation im-
posed on the self by a course of life.
It may seem at fi rst that there are two activities that rescue us, if any
activities can, from mutilation: philosophy and politics. Th ey deal with
everything rather than with something in par tic u lar: the one, in thought;
the other, through action. Th eir true subject is the structure to which the
spirit risks being enslaved: whether it is the institutional order of society
(as well as the view of possible and desirable association that this order
enacts) or the unacknowledged and unwarranted presuppositions of