"And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?"
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Miller’s question arrives like a dare: stop pretending the “potential man” is some tidy self-help blueprint and admit he’s a messier, grander proposition. The phrasing is doing heavy lifting. “After all?” shrugs at the pieties of improvement culture even before we had the term. Then the pivot: potential isn’t a ladder you climb; it’s an inventory you contain. “Sum of all that is human” collapses virtue and vice, ecstasy and appetite, art and obscenity into a single ledger. Miller isn’t flattering humanity so much as refusing to let it be sanitized.
The subtext is classic Miller: a revolt against moral bookkeeping. He wrote in the long shadow of modernism and amid the social tight-lacing that made his work notorious; his novels insist that the body, the vulgar, the impulsive are not embarrassing footnotes but primary documents. So when he lands on “Divine,” it’s not church language so much as a rebranding. Divinity here isn’t purity; it’s totality. If you can hold the whole human range without disowning half of it, you’ve earned a kind of secular holiness.
The intent is also polemical. Miller is taking aim at systems that narrow the human to a role: worker, citizen, sinner, success story. By defining “potential” as the full human sum, he rejects the idea that we become “better” by becoming smaller. The line’s power is its audacity: it smuggles a radical permission slip inside a philosophical question.
The subtext is classic Miller: a revolt against moral bookkeeping. He wrote in the long shadow of modernism and amid the social tight-lacing that made his work notorious; his novels insist that the body, the vulgar, the impulsive are not embarrassing footnotes but primary documents. So when he lands on “Divine,” it’s not church language so much as a rebranding. Divinity here isn’t purity; it’s totality. If you can hold the whole human range without disowning half of it, you’ve earned a kind of secular holiness.
The intent is also polemical. Miller is taking aim at systems that narrow the human to a role: worker, citizen, sinner, success story. By defining “potential” as the full human sum, he rejects the idea that we become “better” by becoming smaller. The line’s power is its audacity: it smuggles a radical permission slip inside a philosophical question.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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