overcoming the world 85A major part of this off er turns on the prospect of enhancing and
transforming, by the way in which we connect them, two varieties of
individual and collective self- assertion. One variety regards our rela-
tions to our fellow human beings. Th e other variety refers to our rela-
tion to the or ga nized institutional and conceptual settings of our life
and thought.
Th ere is a problem about our relation— practical, emotional, and
cognitive— to other people: we both need them and fear them. It is only
through encounter and connection that we develop and sustain an in-
dividual self. Nevertheless, every social attachment threatens to entan-
gle us in a structure of dependence and domination and to make the
individual self bend to the demands of a collective ste reo type. To be
freer and bigger would be to see the confl ict between the enabling
requirements of self- assertion attenuated: more connection, achieved
at less of a price in dependence and depersonalization.
Th ere is, as well, a problem about our relation to the institutional
and conceptual settings of our action: the institutional or ga ni za tion of
society and the discursive or ga ni za tion of thought forming the collec-
tive backdrop to individual existence. To act, we must engage these so-
cial and conceptual regimes on their own terms. It is only through such
engagement that we develop and sustain individual personality; with-
out it, we remain empty. However, every such engagement threatens to
become a surrender. We risk giving up to the institutional and concep-
tual regimes under which we live the powers that we should properly
and ultimately reserve to ourselves. To be freer and bigger would be to be
able to share in these contexts without surrendering to them our powers
of re sis tance and reconstruction.
Th e point is not just to challenge and change the social and concep-
tual frameworks in which we habitually move; it is to change our rela-
tion to them. Here are two equivalent ways of describing the change
that is to be desired.
In one description, the distance between the ordinary moves that we
make within a framework, leaving it undisturbed and even unseen, and
the extraordinary moves, by which we bring pieces of the framework
into question, will diminish. Our social arrangements and discursive
practices will provide instruments and opportunities for their revision.
Society and thought will be so arranged that we can be better equipped