426 becoming more human by becoming more godlikeof value and reality as at best incomplete and disputable. His actions
and associations foreshadow, within the present institutional and con-
ceptual context of his activity, not just a diff erent order but also a diff er-
ent kind of order. Th ey are a practical prophecy.
In his manner of being both insider and outsider, he shows how liv-
ing for the future can become a way of living in the present, as a being
for whom circumstance can never have the fi nal say. Life then becomes
prophetic without ceasing to be ordinary. It is the type of prophecy
suitable to democracy.
Th e tension between being an insider and being an outsider helps
undermine any equilibrium in the self that has as its requirement the
containment or suppression of vitality. It works to enhance life, and to
dissolve the mummy.
A fourth mark of a life lived so that death happens only once is the way
in which such a life addresses the relation between the formulaic and
the anti- formulaic elements in our activity. Th e central problem lies in
the two- sidedness of the formulaic: it is both friendly and unfriendly to
life. Th e consequences of this two- sidedness are apparent in the rela-
tion between the two sides of the mind: the formulaic machine and the
non- formulaic anti- machine. In the workings of the mind, as in all
other aspects of our experience, repetition need not be deadweight.
Th e imagination works in two steps: by distancing from immediate
experience (perception recalled as image) and by subsuming a state of
aff airs under a larger range of transformative variations, the proxi-
mate possible as a wedge into the understanding of the actual. If there
were no structure of recurrent perception and reasoning, the imagi-
nation would have no place to begin. It would be like the dove men-
tioned in the Critique of Pure Reason. Th e dove thought that if only it
did not need to contend with the re sis tance of the air, it would fl y
even faster.
Th e same duality recurs in the character of work. Labor is the em-
bodiment of our mental life in production and cooperation. It, too, can
be either formulaic or anti- formulaic. To the extent that it is formulaic,
we act as if we were machines. For a machine is nothing other than the
physical embodiment of formulaic activity. What ever we have learned
how to repeat we can express in a formula. What ever we can express in