370 becoming more human by becoming more godlikeVirtues of connection
Th e threshold obstacle that we face in the making of a self is our self-
centeredness. Having discovered in early childhood that the world is
not or ga nized around him, the individual resists renouncing his self-
centeredness and submitting to the discipline of society. From the
perspective of the morality honored in every social and cultural re-
gime, the premise of what we owe one another is that each of us is sim-
ply one among many. Even the most hierarchical order insists on en-
gaging those who occupy the highest rank in its hierarchy in a web of
reciprocal obligations.
Th e overcoming of our self- centeredness manifests itself, in the fi rst
instance, in constraints that the individual must recognize and observe
on the pursuit of his own interests in relation to the interests of others:
whether they are strangers or people to whom we have close attach-
ments. Moral phi los o phers have generally taken the justification
and guidance of this task— the taming of self- interest by obligation
to others— to be the entire object of morality and therefore as well
the whole subject of their philosophy. Th is prejudice accounts for the
way in which modern moral philosophy has amounted largely to a
series of variations on ethical universalism. It has been content to
represent, in cold and anodyne form, the moral residue of the reli-
gious revolutions of the past: the advocacy of an inclusive altruism,
reduced, for the most part, to a doctrine of impersonal and disinter-
ested obligation.
In fact, however, the overcoming of self- centeredness represents only
a preliminary, albeit an indispensable one, in the or ga ni za tion and di-
rection of our moral experience. Any view that accords it— as moral
philosophy generally has— a central or even an exclusive role will ap-
pear to us as a crude and childish repre sen ta tion of what is involved in
shaping our relations to other people. Th at is why the works devoted to
the elaboration of this view seem to be about a much simpler and more
stupid kind of being, one more defi cient in the capacity for life, than the
one represented in the literature that we cherish.
Th e fi rst element missing from that picture of our humanity is an
appreciation of what we most want from one another: to be imagined