becoming more human by becoming more godlike 371and accepted for what we are and might become. Such is the direction
of a greater love or, in the absence of love, of the higher forms of coop-
eration, not of a perfect altruism. Its requirement is the ac cep tance of
an enhanced vulnerability. Th e obstacle that it must overcome is our
obscurity to one another, itself the consequence of the unlimited depth
of the self. Th e subject matter on which it touches is the confl ict be-
tween the conditions of our self- assertion: between our needs for con-
nection and for self- standing personality.
Th is confl ict is resolved not by altruism— which maintains the pos-
ture of a superior benevolence— but by the development of all those
forms of attachment and association that exact less by way of surrender
and subjugation. Th e invention and development of such forms is the
overriding task of the moral imagination. It is a task that we advance
when we treat a remote and disinterested altruism as inferior to a per-
sonal and engaged love, or when we reject, for the sake of a regime of
cooperation with the attributes that I earlier described, the established
arrangements of the division of labor in society.
Th e second element missing from that account of what we owe an-
other is a reckoning with the shadow that falls on our attachments: our
ambivalence to other people. Th is ambivalence is, in one sense, a source
of our failure to give greater weight to the interests of other people. It is,
in another sense, a complication besetting our connections, regardless
of the ascendancy of altruism over self- interest.
Hatred arises within love, and love within hatred. Every emotion
conceived in the context of a connection turns readily into its opposite.
Only indiff erence aff ords a relative protection against ambivalence. It
does so, however, at the cost of inhibiting our progress toward attenuat-
ing the confl ict between the enabling requirements of self- assertion.
Th e others are at once our heaven and our hell.
What this ambivalence reveals is the ultimately insoluble character
of the problem presented by what we demand from other people. Th e
problem is not that we fi nd it hard to give them their due. In fact much
of ordinary human life is, and always has been, sacrifi cial— for the fam-
ily, for the state, and for the future. Th e problem is that we want from
others more than they can give us: an assurance of our place in the
world, an antidote to mortality and groundlessness. Th us, the insa-
tiability characterizing our whole experience of desire is excited to a