The World and Us

Description

“A restless visionary striving to realize the highest aspirations of modernity itself.”
–New York Times

A radical re-envisioning of the human condition by the acclaimed Brazilian philosopher

In The World and Us, Roberto Mangabeira Unger sets out to reinvent philosophy. His central theme is our transcendence, everything in our existence points beyond itself, and its relation to our finitude: everything that surrounds us, and we ourselves, are flawed and ephemeral.

He asks how we can live so that we die only once, instead of dying many small deaths; how we can breathe new life and new meaning into the revolutionary movement that has aroused humanity for the last three centuries, but that is now weakened and disoriented; and how we can make sense of ourselves without claiming for human beings a miraculous exception to the general regime of nature. For Unger, philosophy must be the mind on fire, insisting on our prerogative to speak to what matters most.

From this perspective, he redefines each of the traditional parts of philosophy, from ontology and epistemology to ethics and politics. He turns moral philosophy into an exploration of the contest between the two most powerful contemporary moral visions: an ethic of self-fashioning and non-conformity, and an ethic of human connection and responsibility.

And he turns political philosophy into a program of deep freedom, showing how to democratize the market economy, energize democratic politics, and give the individual worker and citizen the means to flourish amid permanent innovation.Prologue: Finitude and Transcendence in Human Experience
Our Dreamlike and Vertiginous Existence
Philosophy
This Book: Its Scope, Plan, and Character

1. Ontology (as Natural Philosophy and Social Theory)
The Study of What the World Is Like
The Rejection of Metaphysical Rationalism
The Philosophy of Deep Structure and Its Afterlife in Natural Science
The Philosophy of the Timeless One
Temporal Naturalism
Mathematics: The World Emptied Out of Time and Phenomenal Particularity
Causality and Time
No Kingdom within a Kingdom: Deep Structure, Dualism, and Temporal Naturalism
The Human Difference, without Dualism
The Message of This Ontology

2. Epistemology (as Inquiry into Inquiry)
Epistemology and Its Discontents
The Denial of Finitude and Transcendence in Epistemology
The Mistakes of Epistemology Further Examined
The Agent of Inquiry and His Capabilities
The Idea of a Program of Inquiry
The First Crisis: Fundamental Physics and Its Denial of Time, Change, and Causality
The Second Crisis: The Social Sciences and the Suppression of Structural Vision
The Intellectual Division of Labor and the Marriage of Method to Subject Matter
Implications for Natural Science
Implications for the Social Sciences, the Normative Public Disciplines, and the Humanities
Genius Reimagined
A Coda to Epistemology: Art

3. The Human Condition: Becoming More
Human by Becoming More Godlike
The Hinge of Philosophy
Impenetrable Darkness: The Amazing Situation
Finitude: Groundlessness
Finitude: Mortality
Transcendence: Desire
Transcendence: Imagination
Transcendence: Refusal of Belittlement
Finitude and Transcendence as Connecting Threads in the Human Condition
Finitude and Transcendence Reinterpreted: The Semitic Monotheisms and Their Narrative of Redemption
Finitude and Transcendence Reinterpreted: The Idea of One and the Timeless One
The Contradictory Requirements for Sustaining a Self

4. Ethics (as Clarity about the Conduct of Life)
Ethics and Its Work
The Christian Faith and the Conduct of Life
The Secular Romance
The School Philosophy
Finding a Point of Departure in a Contemporary Contest of Moral Visions

5. Two Ways To Die Only Once
The Ethic of Self-fashioning and Non-conformity
The Ethic of Connection and Responsibility

6. The Unresolved Contest Between the Ethics of Self-Fashioning and of Connection
The Dust of History: The United States, China, and the Two Ethics
The Twin Functional Imperatives of the Advanced Societies
The Impossible Synthesis between the Two Ethics
A Duality in Our Moral Consciousness

7. Politics (as Struggle over the Future of Society)
Finitude and Transcendence in Politics
Our Moment in History and World Revolution
The Theory of Regimes: Imagining the Structure of a Society
Sources of a Direction
A Direction: From Shallow Equality to Deep Freedom
A Direction: Deep Freedom and Practical Empowerment in History
A Direction: Deep Freedom and the Contradictions of the Self
The Haven and the Storm

8. Politics: The Program of Deep Freedom
The Idea of an Institutional Program
Democratizing the Market Economy
Deepening Democracy
Cohesion and Freedom: The Self-Organization of Civil Society
Education: Capability and Prophecy
Deep Freedom and World Order

Epilogue

Index of Proper Names and Works
Index of Subjects“A restless visionary striving to realize the highest aspirations of modernity itself”
—William Connolly, New York Times

“One of the few living philosophers whose thinking has the range of the great philosophers of the past.”
—Times Higher Education

“Unger stakes out new discursive space that is neither simply left nor liberal, Marxist nor Lockean, anarchist nor Kantian . . . an emancipatory experimentalism toward ever-increasing democracy and individual freedom”
—Cornel West

“Here something new has occurred: a philosophical mind out of the Third World turning the tables, to become synoptist and seer of the First.”
—Perry Anderson

“What makes Unger different is his orientation toward the future rather than the past—his hopefulness.”
—Richard Rorty

“Unger insists on the need to refocus on what really matters, the human spirit.”
—John Paul Rathbone, Financial Times

“Brazil’s answer to John Stuart Mill. A political philosopher extraordinaire.”
—Chronicle of Higher EducationRoberto Mangabeira Unger is one of the leading philosophers and social thinkers in the world today. He is active in Brazilian public life and has served twice as Brazil’s Minister of Strategic Affairs, charged with developing initiatives that signal a direction for his country. A polymath, he has written widely in legal, political, economic, and moral theory as well as in natural philosophy. Among his major writings are Passion: An Essay on Personality, a modernist view of human nature; False Necessity, a radical alternative to Marxist social theory; and, most recently, The Knowledge Economy, a study of the unrealized potential of the new vanguard of production. The World and Us is the capstone of his lifework.GB

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