struggling with the world 181condition. So, less explicitly and more surprisingly, do the profane ver-
sions, if not with respect to our mortality, then with regard to our
groundlessness or our insatiability.
At the same time, the would- be sciences of society and of the mind
have failed to do justice to the dialectic of engagement and transcen-
dence in their treatment of the relation of the self to the social and
conceptual worlds that it inhabits. To this re sis tance and to these fail-
ures, we must attribute, in large part, the inexplicit, halting develop-
ment of the views of self and structure and self and others that the
struggle with the world supports and requires. Th e heresies of romanti-
cism and the favor shown to a universal and disembodied altruism
have regularly taken the place of these views of spirit and structure and
of self and others.
Th e idea of the inexhaustibility of the self by its defi nite and limited
circumstance helps shape a conception of love. In love, according to this
account, we recognize and accept one another as context- transcendent
originals rather than as placeholders in an or ga nized scheme of social
division and hierarchy. Th e experience of love is suff used and trans-
formed by the longing for the infi nite, which bears the marks of our
insatiability, against the background of our groundlessness and our
mortality. Nowhere is this insatiability more powerfully expressed than
in our demand, in love, to receive endless tokens of assurance that there
is an unconditional place for us in the world. Th is demand, always
doomed to be frustrated, turns into a spiritual error when we expect love
to abolish our groundlessness.
We honor the embodied and situated character of the self by reject-
ing the romantic campaign against repetition as well as by valuing the
erotic expression of love. Th e erotically disinterested character of altru-
ism, rather than being seen as an additional token of its superiority,
appears, in this view, as a sign of its incompleteness.
Th e relation between the themes of the primacy of love (in the view
of self and others) and of a reaching beyond the established context of
life or of thought (in the account of self and structure) assigns us a task
that we can never hope fully to carry out. In love, we recognize one
another as the context- transcendent originals that we all know our-
selves and want ourselves to be. In the real societies and cultures in
which we participate, however, we are not yet these originals. We are