170 struggling with the worldTh e ideal limit of the suppressed orthodoxy is not a defi nitive and
all- encompassing structure. It is rather a structure that renders itself, in
the highest degree, contestable and corrigible, and thus helps rescue us
from the reduction of our humanity to our circumstance.
Self and others
If the relation between spirit and structure is one domain in which the
struggle with the world reveals its implications for the conduct of life
and the or ga ni za tion of society, another is the relation between the in-
dividual and other people. Th ese two aspects of the existential orienta-
tion supported by this view of the world are more intimately connected
than we have understood them to be. Together, they amount to a com-
prehensive view of how to live.
Until relatively recently in the history of humanity, the dominant
idea about what our relations to other people can and should be at their
best has given pride of place to altruism: an overcoming of selfi shness
by disinterested benevolence. Th e premise of this view is that the basic
problem of the moral life is the disposition to sacrifi ce the interests of
others to our own interests. Only reluctantly and partially, on this ac-
count, does each of us give up the conviction that he is the center of the
world or imagine a world in which he plays no part. Altruism gains a
diff erent meaning, and rests on a diff erent basis, in the overcoming of
the world and in the humanization of the world.
In Mahayana Buddhism, for example (as in the philosophy of Scho-
penhauer), altruism is universal fellow feeling. Its metaphysical foun-
dation is the shallow or illusory character of distinctions among beings
and among people. All individuals, all sentient creatures, and even all
apparently distinct phenomena are united by their common participa-
tion in unifi ed and hidden being.
If this being is also timeless, the individual is removed, albeit only in
thought and in thought- laden experience, to an existence far away from
the one in which time rules as the unforgiving master. Th e result is to
place at the summit of our ideal relations to one another a view that is
as remote as any view could be from our embodied longings.