struggling with the world 173tension between these two requirements of selfh ood vanishes. We need
not pay for connection any price of subjugation and depersonalization.
However, we must pay another price for a good of unlimited value:
we must cast away the shields by which we defend ourselves not only
against the beloved but also against our need for her. Love may be re-
buff ed. In searching for it and in experiencing it, we give hostages to
fortune and depend upon the grace of the beloved, whether the beloved
is human or divine.
Our self- interest, our insistence on engaging the world as if every-
thing were about us, is, according to this view, not the overriding prob-
lem in our moral experience. Th e decisive issue is our diffi culty in es-
caping the prison- house of our consciousness enough to imagine the
experience of another person and to see and accept her as the context-
transcending and role- exceeding individual that she is.
Th e mindfulness of others, required by Confucian teaching in the
ser vice of altruism, is not enough. What is required is the inclusive al-
beit incomplete imagination of another, secret self. Imagination informs
the longing and makes possible the ac cep tance. Such is the experience
that we call love. Th e attributes of love are diff erent, in every crucial
respect, from those of the selfl ess altruism that the dominant ideas rec-
ommend as the exemplary moral experience.
In the fi rst place, the lover, what ever his outward social circumstance,
does not put himself in a superior position toward the beloved. He wants
her and needs her. Regardless of social place, the experience of love is, by
this very fact of unlimited longing, an equalizing one. Th is feature of love
is so deeply marked that it must apply, in the sacred voice of the struggle
with the world, even to God and to his relation to mankind. God needs
man and longs for him. In Christianity, this divine yearning forms part
of the perplexing message of the Incarnation.
Second, love, unlike altruism, seeks a response: that the beloved ac-
cept the love and love in return. Because it seeks a response, it may fail.
Love may be rejected, at the outset or later. It may be as hard to accept
love as to love. Th e love of the other represents a form of grace, freely
given or denied. No degree of moral perfection on the part of the lover
can ensure the desired result.
Th ird, in contrast to altruism, love may be associated with joy but
not with serenity. Because it negates all distance and courts failure, it