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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 humani… - Roberto Mangabeira Unger
" "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.
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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.
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Alternative Names:
Roberto M. Unger
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Roberto Unger
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Society will oscillate between long periods of relative stagnation in which state-protected privileges crowd out experiments in the organization of production and brief interludes in which much is destroyed before anything can be created. To perpetuate the practice of innovation, societies must replace such drastic and violent swings with a more constant liquefaction of deals and privileges. They must invent the structures that make structures easier to change.
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In our advance to a greater life, we confront an initial obstacle. Unless we remove or overcome this obstacle, we can rise no further. We spend our time in a daze of diminished existence, neither awake nor asleep. We resign ourselves to compromise and routine, seeing the world through the categories of the prevailing culture or the methods of established ways of thinking. We reconcile ourselves to the mutilation of our experience that we begin to accept when we entered on a particular course of life. We allow ourselves to be subdued by the carapace of diminished experience that formed around is, as we grew older. For the vast majority of men and women, overwhelming economic necessity and drudgery overwhelm and disguise a stupefaction that would otherwise be apparent. For the increasing number of people who, with the material progress of society, are released from grinding material constraint, there is no disguise. In this way, we cease to live as embodied spirit: as the context-bound but context-resisting agents that we really are. That which is most precious—life itself—we give away in return for nothing. We belittle ourselves, wrongly mistaking our belittlement for a fate as inescapable as our mortality, our groundlessness, and our insatiability.
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