The followers of the overcoming of the world will deny that they wage a war against life. They will claim, in accordance with their vision, that their road to salvation enables us to get off the treadmill of insatiable and frustrated desire and allows us to live in the present, open to the world and to the people around us. If each moment and each experience are to be valued as steps to what could or should succeed them, then we shall never live for now. We shall postpone the fuller possession of life. Our anxious striving will make us less receptive to the people as well as the phenomena within reach. We shall have denied ourselves the self-possession that is the condition for the enhancement of vitality.
However, we cannot be fully alive without engaging the world. We cannot engage it without struggling with it, in imagination as well as in practice. We cannot wage this struggle with conviction unless we have reason to take our phenomenal and historical experience seriously rather than to discount the reality of its sources and objects.
The overcoming of the world conflicts with these requirements at two decisive points. It conflicts with them, first, in its vision: the denial of the ultimate reality of time and therefore of history as well as of phenomenal and individual distinction. It contradicts them, second, in its proposal for how we should live our lives by urging on us a search for serenity through invulnerability. Such a search turns us away from the engagements required for the enhancement of life. It promises serenity, but delivers a foretaste of death.
The need for transformative engagement with the world as a requirement of vitality is not confined to practical activity. It already arises in the work of the imagination. That work relies on two recurrent moves. The first move—the only one acknowledged by Kant—is distancing. The phenomenon must be evoked in its absence; an image is the memory of a perception. The second move is transformation; to understand a phenomenon or a state of affairs is to grasp what it can become under certain conditions or by virtue of particular interventions. Insight into what can happen next is internally related to insight into the existent; the latter deepens in proportion to the advance of the former.
In all these respects, the imagination accompanies and outreaches our practical activities. In its evolutionary setting it serves the purposes of a mindful organism that must solve problems in particular circumstances, equipped with a limited perceptual apparatus, and contend with uncertainty, contingency, and constraint. Thus, in its origins and evolutionary uses, it already stands in the service of life and of power.
However, the imagination soon goes beyond its immediate service to practical problem solving. It develops our understanding of what is in the light of our insight into what may come to be. Its focus is less the phantasmagorical horizon of ultimate possibilities, which we are powerless to discern, than the content of the proximate possible: of what can happen, or we can make happen. The commanding principle of the imagination is its affinity to action, grounded in their shared element: enacted or anticipated change. Openness to transformation, in biographical and historical time and in a world in which the differences among phenomena are both real and subject to change, is part of what we mean by life.
The religion of the overcoming of the world is hostile, both as a vision and as a project, to the enhancement of life. In tempting us to don a coat of armor against the sufferings induced by our mortality, our groundlessness, our insatiability, and our difficulty in living as beings who transcend their contexts, it cannot in fact make us more receptive to the people and to the phenomena surrounding us. It cannot do so because it denies us the means and the occasions by which to imagine them. It fails to strengthen the sentiment of life within us because it prefers serenity to vitality.
Criticism: betrayal of the future
The religion of the overcoming of the world was never capable of carrying out the shared element in the program of past religious revolution. Moreover, it could never be reconciled to the tenacious dispositions and aspirations of humanity except through a deliberate dimming of consciousness and vitality, undertaken in the futile quest to achieve serenity through invulnerability. Similarly, it cannot serve as a starting point for a future revolution in the religious affairs of mankind that is animated by the aim of lifting humanity up, of enhancing its powers, of intensifying its experience, of giving it a wider share in the attributes of divinity, of acting on the principle that we can become better servants of one another if we become greater masters of the structures of society and of thought to which we habitually surrender our humanity.
At the heart of the program of this future religious revolution lies a problem that is squarely presented by the third of the three world-historical religious orientations—the struggle with the world—but that is as foreign to the overcoming of the world as it is to the humanization of the world. In posing this problem, I can rightly be accused of judging one of these traditions by the standards of another. And so I do. I profess no neutrality among them. I claim for one of them an authority that the other two have never gained, and can never hope to gain, in the eyes of humankind: the authority that results from having helped inform and inspire the revolutionary projects that have shaken the world in the last two centuries. These projects fall into two main types: the secular programs of emancipation (democracy, liberalism, and socialism) and the worldwide popular romantic culture.
I later return to the question of the sense in which we have reason to defend and to reinvent these projects. What, however, not even their enemies will be able to deny is that these twin revolutionary messages have exerted an influence in the recent history of mankind unparalleled in its reach. This message derives its power from its promise to elevate human life for the many right now and to continue doing so in the future. In their discourse, common humanity has identified an offer—of recognition as well as empowerment—that it cannot refuse.
A major part of this offer 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 relations to our fellow human beings. The other variety refers to our relation to the organized institutional and conceptual settings of our life and thought.
There 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 individual self. Nevertheless, every social attachment threatens to entangle us in a structure of dependence and domination and to make the individual self bend to the demands of a collective stereotype. To be freer and bigger would be to see the conflict between the enabling requirements of self-assertion attenuated: more connection, achieved at less of a price in dependence and depersonalization.
There is, as well, a problem about our relation to the institutional and conceptual settings of our action: the institutional organization of society and the discursive organization of thought forming the collective backdrop to individual existence. To act, we must engage these social and conceptual regimes on their own terms. It is only through such engagement that we develop and sustain individual personality; without it, we remain empty. However, every such engagement threatens to become a surrender. We risk giving up to the institutional and conceptual 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 resistance and reconstruction.
The point is not just to challenge and change the social and conceptual frameworks in which we habitually move; it is to change our relation 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 and provoked to reconsider and to revise the order as we go about our daily business within it. As a result, we shall be able to say to a greater extent that we can both engage particular social and conceptual regimes and go beyond them. In the old theological language,