becoming more human by becoming more godlike 359enabling conditions of self- affi rmation: between our embrace by an-
other person and our separateness from her. In this embrace, we seek
an assurance of our own being that can withstand the prospect of death
and the inscrutability of existence.
However, no fi nite circumstance or attachment can bear the weight
of this unlimited longing for the infi nite. Th e very attribute that makes
us into the prime candidates to serve for one another as proxies for the
inaccessible absolute— the indefi nite depth and obscurity of the self—
ensures that we cannot satisfy our desire for an ac cep tance so uncondi-
tional that it can rob both death and groundlessness of their terrors.
Th e life of desire— for things and then for people— is a restlessness
from which we have only the false rescue of diminished life and con-
sciousness. Th e more we discover and affi rm the character of the self as
situated and transcendent, the more do we fi nd ourselves chained to
the wheel of insatiable desire and condemned to demand the absolute
from the relative, the unconditional from the conditional, the infi nite
from the fi nite.
Te r r i fi ed by the certainty of death, forced to recognize our inability to
understand the ground of being and of existence, and tormented by
insatiable desire, for people if not for things, we have cause to wake to
life from our daze of resignation to belittlement. Unwavering recog-
nition of these incurable defects in existence aff ords three vast and
distinct benefi ts.
Th e fi rst benefi t is the ser vice that truthfulness about the fundamen-
tal facts of our existence renders to self- understanding and that self-
understanding gives to our rise to a greater life. In the history of the
struggle with the world, every sacred and profane discourse has, to one
extent or another, enlisted illusion in the ser vice of an arousal of the will.
For the sacred versions— the religions of salvation— the illusion has
been a direct denial of the irreparable character of the defects in hu-
man life and the belief that we can repair them with help from a tran-
scendent God who intervenes in history. Th e strengthening of the will,
accomplished at the encouragement of these beliefs, would enable us to
achieve a combination of patience and striving in the face of death and
suff ering: not only to compose ourselves but also to improve both our-
selves and society.