For the struggle with the world, ordinary men and women have the spark of the divine. They are embodied spirit, unresigned to belittling circumstance… - Roberto Mangabeira Unger
" "For the struggle with the world, ordinary men and women have the spark of the divine. They are embodied spirit, unresigned to belittling circumstance. They can ascend, whether or not with the help of divine grace …. It is not just that the lowly are equal to the lordly and that the vulgar forms of sensibility are as revealing as the hieratic or canonical ones. It is that the lowly and the vulgar are higher. They are higher because they are freer from the posturing and vigilance—over himself and others—that prevent each of us from coming closer to what Shakespeare called the thing itself: unaccommodated man. The more orphaned ordinary men and women are by the established powers of the world, the more reason they have to find the divine within themselves and to struggle against the constraints that established arrangements impose on their rise to a larger life and a higher state of being.
English
Collect this quote
About Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Roberto Mangabeira Unger (born 24 March 1947) is a philosopher, politician, and law professor whose writings span the fields of social theory, philosophy of law, economics, religion, science, and general philosophy. Widely known as a key figure in the Critical Legal Studies movement, Unger has developed an intellectual project that proposes changes to political and social structures that would make society and individual lives more open to self-revision, fulfillment, risk-taking and experiment.
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Roberto M. Unger
•
Roberto Unger
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Roberto Mangabeira Unger
The movement of people and ideas is ... more than useful; it is sacrosanct. It forms part of the process by which the whole human race becomes both one and diverse, and makes itself more godlike, by affirming in the individual as well as in the species, its preeminence over the particular social and cultural worlds that it builds and inhabits. Both the movement of people and the movement of ideas can unsettle and frighten us, driving us back into ourselves. They can also inspire us to reimagine and to remake our interests, our ideals, and even our identities, by beginning to detach them from the settings with which we habitually associate them. Each of them is therefore an invitation to open ourselves to the new, in a world in which every man and woman has a better chance to become the original that he imagines himself to be.
The art of self-transformation for the sake of developing practical capabilities seems to have a similar content in the most varied historical circumstances. The Mamluks and the Normans suffered defeat because they failed to open up and readjust the organizational and social contexts of warfare. The Seljuqs succeeded because they did just that. The West African coastal kingdoms used an extraneous technological advantage to avoid having to change radically. But they could neither go on the offensive against the savanna states nor prepare themselves to resist their European patrons and trading partners. In all these instances success seems to have required the dissociation and recombination of available models of the organizational and social context of military activity. To have succeeded would not have meant, for the Mamluks, becoming like the Ottomans; it would have meant creating an order that never existed before. To possess the alien, you must change it.
Limited Time Offer
Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.
Loading...