Gradually, the levels of both generalized trust and specialized responsibility can rise. Their joint ascent will, in this new circumstance, signal the advance of the project of humanization. The individual, however, may continue to live in two worlds: the public world of work and of dealings among strangers, given over to the new moral dispensation, and the domestic world in which, uncomfortably and under pressure, the ancient marriage of exchange, power, and allegiance survives.
This second world may be more than a residue of the old, now forbidden combination. It may also be the seat of a prophecy of a higher form of life. Its guiding aspiration may cease to be the superimposition of allegiance and sentiment on the harsh realities of power and exchange and become instead the softening of the tension between spirit and structure, love and routine, with regard to the possibilities of reconciliation between two individual beings. The life plan of each becomes part of the other one’s plan. Here, however, we reach the limits of a role-oriented mode of moral thinking and confront problems and possibilities with which such a form of thought is unable to deal.
Criticism: betrayal of the past
I now apply to the humanization of the world the same method of criticism applied earlier to the overcoming of the world: its power to realize the goals that were common to these three orientations to existence, its prospect of conforming human nature to its view of the good, and its relation to the concerns that may or should be central to the next revolution in the history of religion.
There are two crucial respects in which the humanization of the world, as exemplified by the teachings of Confucius, comes up short by the standard of its fidelity to the aspirations shared by the religious revolutions of the past. The first respect concerns its relation to the dialectic between transcendence and immanence: the most important point of contrast between the religions and philosophies that exemplify the three orientations to life considered here and the beliefs that they replaced. The second respect in which the humanization of the world fails to do justice to the shared element in the religious revolutions of the past has to do with its attitude to social division and hierarchy.
The assertion of transcendence—of the transcendence of the divine or the sacred over nature and society as well as of our human powers to transcend the circumstances in which we find ourselves—remains insecure within this approach to existence. Nothing in its anti-metaphysical metaphysics or in its naturalistic moral psychology provides an adequate basis on which to affirm our power to resist and overcome the social and conceptual regimes in which we find ourselves enmeshed.
For the Semitic monotheisms, the chief instance of the struggle with the world before the rise of the modern secular projects of political or personal emancipation, transcendence takes the unmistakable form of the separation of God from the world. The problem then becomes how this chasm, once opened up, is to be bridged: through some countervailing embodiment of the divine in humanity and in history. For Buddhism or its precursors in the metaphysics of the Vedas, transcendence lies in the superior reality of hidden and unified being, viewed in relation to the phenomenal and temporal world.
For Confucianism, as the most influential example of humanizing the world, our power of transcendence over circumstance and presupposition, if it has any meaning or force, has as its seat the experience of the personal and of personal encounter, viewed in relation to everything else. What is most real and valuable about this experience lies in a web of relations to others; the personal to be nurtured and revered is the interpersonal.
The sacrosanct experience of the personal stands in contrast primarily to dark nature, which we must master and turn to our purposes but cannot hope to fathom. Secondarily, it remains opposed to the regime of society, which deserves our allegiance only insofar as it respects and sustains this sacred core of existence. The spirit of the interpersonal has, for Confucianism, its consummate expression in jen: the quality of self-expression and self-formation that is expressed in both sympathy and detachment.
The premise of this devotion is our ability to understand the experience of others. Imagination—the imagination of their inner life and aspirations—informs our efforts to minister to their needs. It does so on the basis of the social roles that each of us performs.
The affirmation of the sanctity of the personal (or, more precisely, of the interpersonal) is not peculiar to Confucianism; it is a trait of all the many versions of the humanization of the world that have appeared in the course of the religious history of humanity. Even in our partly Christianized culture, it is captured by a conception that exerts a wide influence today: the view of intimate encounter as a domain of the private sublime, in which we can accept the instrumental calculus of interests and efficiencies only insofar as such calculation serves an experience beyond instrumental concerns.
To form part of a naturalistic account of our powers of transcendence, the idea of the sanctity of personality and of personal encounter must be combined with an iconoclastic attitude to the institutional and ideological settings in which personal experience takes place. However, it cannot be so combined without accommodating a conception of the self that is foreign to it and that takes our moral and political imagination in a completely different direction. This conception is the idea of a human being as embodied spirit, an idea that has been central (as I later argue) to the tradition of the struggle with the world, in its profane as well as its sacred registers.
According to this idea, there is more in us, in each of us individually as well as in all of us collectively, than there is or ever can be in the social and conceptual regimes that we inhabit. Although they shape us, we exceed them. Our transcendence over context is expressed in the idea, central to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, that we already share in the attributes of God. We can increase our share in these attributes thanks to the partnership between divine redemption and human striving.
Belief in our transcendence over context may take—and in much of the world does take—a purely secular form, presupposing no faith in a narrative of dealings between God and humanity. Such secular creeds may speak to the self and the mind, or to society and its transformation. However, even when they deal with the personal, they also address the political. When they neglect to connect ideas about the self and the mind with ideas about society and its reconstruction, they do justice to neither. They then fail fully to vindicate the idea of embodied spirit. They leave the claim of our powers of transcendence undeveloped, ungrounded, and, above all, lacking in a vision of what to do.
Consider, as an example, a view of the mind that, in a contemporary vocabulary, exemplifies the idea of the person as embodied spirit. The mind has a dual character. In some respects, it is like a machine, made up of modular parts and operating according to formula. In other respects, it is an anti-machine, equipped with the power to overstep its own settled methods and presuppositions.
The relative power of this anti-machine, which we call the imagination, is not shaped solely by physical features of the brain, such as its plasticity. It depends, also and even chiefly, on the organization of society and culture. This organization may widen or narrow the space for the workings of the imagination, and afford it or deny it equipment. For this reason, the history of politics is internal to the history of the mind.
Any such vision of our radical transcendence, with or without belief in the encounter between God and mankind, is alien to the humanization of the world. It relies on ideas about us and our place in the world that contradict the assumptions of this tradition of thought and recommend rejecting the moral and political attitudes it favors.
Without the support of some such vision, the idea of the sacred character of personal connection remains a weak basis for an ideal of transcendence. We do not experience personality and personal encounter in a social and historical vacuum. We experience them in a setting prepared for us by the history of a particular society. Will it be our purpose to reinvent this template or merely to improve it; to make it serve our ascent to a higher form of life or to content ourselves with a modicum of success in diminishing its cruelties? Will we nurture the hope of at last making ourselves at home in a social world transformed by our enhanced ability to imagine the experience of other people and to attend to their needs, according to the social stations