Roberto Mangabeira Unger Quotes

The individual, his character, and his fate are for real. Each individual is different from every other individual who has ever lived or who will ever live. A human life is a dramatic and irreversible movement from birth to death, surrounded by mystery and overshadowed by chance.

One of the greatest merits of the critical legal studies movement was to have created an intellectual space in which law and legal thought could be better used to resist the dictatorship of no alternatives. Its limited but important contribution to such resistance was the development of ideas about alternatives, made from the contradictions and variations in established law. The greatest failure of the movement was not to have embraced and executed this task more fully.

The single idea that resounds on every page of this book is the idea of the infinity of the human spirit, in the individual as well as in humanity. It is a view of the wonderful and terrible disproportion of that spirit to everything that would contain and diminish it, of its awakening to its own nature through its confrontation with the reality of constraint and the prospect of death, of its terror before the indifference and vastness of the nature around it, of its discovery that what it most shares with the whole of the universe is its ruination by time, of its subsequent recognition that time is the core of reality if anything is, of its enslavement to orders of society and culture that belittle it, of its need to create a world, a human world, in which it can be and become itself even if to do so it must nevertheless rebel against every dogma, every custom, and every empire, and of its power to realize this seemingly impossible and paradoxical program by identifying, in each intellectual and political situation, the next steps.

By marrying experiment to speculation, we put ourselves in a dimmer version of the circumstance of the Creator. We remake nature or we imagine it remade. By this expedient we free ourselves, if only partly and tentatively, from suspicion of our beliefs, and we live once again, unafraid, in the light of the actual.

In an age of democracy and of peaceful or warlike communion among all parts of humanity, philosophy, like poetry and politics, must be prophetic. The content of its prophecy is a vision of how it is that we may respond, right now and with the instruments at hand, to the experience of being lost in a void that is made up of time, into the beginning and end of which we cannot see, and that is indifferent to our concerns. It is a prophecy of the path of our unchaining and of our ascent in a world of time, in which we remain always bound to death and forever denied insight into the ultimate nature of reality.... No philosopher or philosophical tradition in the last two centuries has had a monopoly on this prophecy. It is everywhere.

Obama’s manner in dealing with other people and acting in the world fully exemplifies the cheerful impersonal friendliness—the middle distance—that marks American sociability. (Now allow me to speak as a critic. Remember Madame de Staël’s meetings that deprive us of solitude without affording us company? Or Schopenhauer’s porcupines, who shift restlessly from getting cold at a distance to prickling one another at close quarters, until they settle into some acceptable compromise position?) The cheerful impersonal friendliness serves to mask recesses of loneliness and secretiveness in the American character, and no less with Obama than with anyone else. He is enigmatic—and seemed so as much then as now—in a characteristically American way.... Moreover, he excelled at the style of sociability that is most prized in the American professional and business class and serves as the supreme object of education in the top prep schools: how to cooperate with your peers by casting on them a spell of charismatic seduction, which you nevertheless disguise under a veneer of self-depreciation and informality. Obama did not master this style in prep school, but he became a virtuoso at it nevertheless, as the condition of preferment in American society that it is. As often happens, the outsider turned out to be better at it than the vast majority of the insiders.... Together with the meritocratic educational achievements, the mastery of the preferred social style turns Obama into what is, in a sense, the first American elite president—that is the first who talks and acts as a member of the American elite—since John Kennedy .... Obama's mixed race, his apparent and assumed blackness, his non-elite class origins and lack of inherited money, his Third-World childhood experiences—all this creates the distance of the outsider, while the achieved elite character makes the distance seem less threatening.

If I propose something distant, you may sayː interesting, but utopian. If I propose something close, you may answerː feasible but trivial. In contemporary efforts to think and talk programmatically, all proposals are made to seem either utopian or trivial. We have lost confidence in our ability to imagine structural change in society, and fall back upon a surrogate standardː a proposal is realistic if it approaches what already exists. It is easy to be a realist if you accept everything.

[T]here is a path of ascent, requiring and enabling us to undergo a transformation of both society and the self, and rewarding us with an incomparable good. The incomparable good is a greater share of the attributes of the divine, or eternal life, or a greater life, with higher powers, making us more godlike.

The cultural revolutionary wants to show how roles can be stretched, pulled apart, combined with other roles, and used incongruously. He acts out of a loosened sense of what it means to occupy a role. In this way he helps disrupt frozen connections among social stations, life experiences, and stereotyped forms of insight and sensibility. He thereby carries into the drama of everyday personal relations the effort to free sociability from its script and to make us available to one another more as the originals we all know ourselves to be and less as placeholders in a system of group contrasts.

There is one type of functional advantage that enjoys in this dark struggle unique status and deserves special attention. As the force of path dependency in history wanes, and as different forms of life and consciousness get more jumbled together, this force gains in importance. It is negative capabilityː the power to act nonformulaically, in defiance of what rules and routines would predict, a power that may be inspired and strengthened, or discouraged and weakened, by our arrangements and practices as well as by our ways of thinking and feeling.

Just as the attempt to actualize liberal ideals requires ideas and arrangements unfamiliar to liberals, so the effort to make our moral experience resemble more closely what so much of moral thought already supposes it to be like calls for a practice of role defiance and role jumbling that has little place in traditional moral doctrines.

A democratic experimentalist will not stand waiting for the next magical moment. Rather than have us be crowned by history, he will insist that we crown ourselves.

Openness to the new is the virtue that describes the moral consequence of the doctrine of the relation of spirit to structure. The religion of the future inherits this doctrine from the struggle with the world, and radicalizes it. This virtue acts out the human truth of our relation to the settled contexts of our life and thought. That they are ephemeral and defective, that they cannot accommodate all the experience and insight we have reason to value, that there is always more in us, individually as well as collectively, than is, or ever can be, in them are facts giving us persistent reason to rebel against such structures.

It has been a continuing theme of this book that our commitment to any approach to the problems of existence (the overcoming of the world, the humanization of the world, and the struggle with the world first among them) can enjoy no definitive justification. Its demands always exceed, immeasurably, its grounds for making them. It says, “Follow me.” It can never give a conclusive reason to do so. All that it can do is to make an incomplete argument and a defeasible appeal. It cannot escape the circularity in all our large-scale transformative projects: for better or worse, each of them is a partly self-fulfilling prophecy. If it is embraced and it works, it remakes part of experience in its image.

The relation of politics to personality in this deepening of democracy has a scope broader than the need to economize on political virtue. One way to explore this relation is to consider the bearing of a program like the one outlined here upon two great sources of human sadnessː the loss of vitality and the disproportion between such vitality as we keep and the activities normally available for its expression.