humanizing the world 115Just as this approach to life fails to reckon with the subtleties of our
relation to the established regime of society and of culture, so too it
fails to off er an adequate account of the fl uidity and ambivalence of our
dealings with one another. Th e ideal of a detached selfl essness attentive
to the needs of others, respectful of the roles that each performs, and
untroubled in its would- be clarity of vision is its characteristic posture.
A premise of this posture is that a disinterested benevolence has a clear
direction, that it can readily be distinguished from the emotions that it
opposes and replaces, and that it can provide a stable source of guid-
ance amid the uncertainties of life.
Th is view contradicts the reality of our relations to other people. In
the fi rst place, love passes readily into hatred, and hatred into love. Am-
bivalence trails even our closest attachments.
Th is radical dynamism of the life of passion does not result simply
from occasional or peripheral features of our conscious life. It arises
from a deep- seated confl ict between the enabling conditions of our
self- construction. Each of us makes a self through encounter and con-
nection with others. Every connection, however, brings with it the risk
of the entanglement of the self in a scheme that robs us of our self-
possession and self- direction. Ambivalence toward other people is the
psychological expression of this moral truth.
A remote magnanimity— the characteristic moral ideal of the hu-
manization of the world— may contain this ambivalence. It does so at a
cost. Th e cost is the ac cep tance of the low- level equilibrium, the middle
distance neither near to other people nor far from them, that is associ-
ated with the attitude of detached benevolence: doing good without
vulnerability or self- transformation. Th e assurance of superiority on
the part of the benevolent giver comes with no shaking of his existence.
It off ers him serenity and self- possession only by denying him some-
thing more precious: the fuller possession of life.
Th ere is a second reason for which the account of humanity lying at
the center of this approach to existence fails the test of moral realism.
In all our relations to one another and in the way in which we represent
them, two connected but distinct hopes are at stake. Th ere is the hope
of reconciliation: that we may enter into a relationship with others that
enables us to connect more while paying for such connections less of a
price of subjugation and depersonalization. Th ere is also the hope of