Chapter 27 - The Institutions Inside

Summary

Institutions are always involved in the never-ending dialectics between the creative and potentially disrupting drives and dreams arising in concrete interpersonal relationships and individual experience. Morality becomes a mere function of the social system; the inner Christian or Kantian voice of conscience is reduced to a set of social rules and forms of solidarity, issuing from the exigencies of human coexistence. The dialectics that is the essence of both individuals and institutions, as well as of their reciprocal relations, issues only from the intertwining of forces and processes that interact on all levels of human reality, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and socio-cultural. Intentional agents express their powers in concrete particular instances or configurations of historical-cultural conditions, thus coming to interiorize institutions through personal biographical experience.