beyond wishful thinking 15the experience of other people and to minister to their needs. By per-
forming our obligations to one another, as chiefl y defi ned by the roles
we perform in society, we can secure the humanized structure that na-
ture denies us.
Th e best among us, those in whom the power to imagine the experi-
ence of others has been most developed and the disposition to minister
to their needs most pronounced, will no longer need rules, rituals, or
roles to guide them in the conduct of life.
Th is view makes two mistakes that compromise its prospect of dispos-
ing of the problem of existential groundlessness: a mistake about soci-
ety and history and a mistake about the self. Th e mistake about society
and history is to credit any par tic u lar social regime with the power to
accommodate all the experiences that we have reason to value, or rep-
resent the authoritative setting for the discharge of our obligations to
one another. Because no social regime can be incontestable, none can
hope to provide a grounding for human life that could make up for the
grounding that nature denies us.
Th e mistake about the self is to depreciate a truth about humanity
that is revealed in the third irreparable fl aw in the human condition
(which I next discuss): our insatiability. We demand of one another, as
well as of the social and cultural worlds that we build and inhabit, more
than we and they can off er. Th e advancement of our most fundamental
material and moral interests regularly requires us to defy and to revise
any settled plan of social life. Th e ultimate source of this power of re sis-
tance and defi ance is that there is more in us, individually as well as
collectively, than there is, or ever can be, in such regimes. We depend
on others to make a self, but fear dependence as subjugation: the mak-
ing and the undoing of the self have similar sources.
It follows from our confl icted relation to the structures of social life,
as well as from our ambivalent relation to one another, that the improve-
ment of society cannot amount to the self- grounding of humanity. It
will not, unless we deceive ourselves or collude in our own enslavement,
assuage the anguish of existential groundlessness.
Th e provisional conclusion is that none of the ways in which the
major civilizations of world history have attempted to prevent specu-
lative groundlessness from turning into existential groundlessness suc-
ceed. Th ey are defective as theory, however, only because they are also