becoming more human by becoming more godlike 391seek in the accumulation of things a futile surrogate for dependence
upon people and at other times project onto par tic u lar things the un-
limited yearning inspired in us by individuals. Th e result is to enhance
the insatiable character of even our most material desires, making them
proxies and pawns of the experience of personal encounter.
A third element in the experience of insatiable desire arises later,
from the discovery of death and groundlessness. Th is discovery can
never be completely avoided, despite the charms of the feel- good phi-
losophies and theologies. To the extent that it is undergone, although
denied, it inspires in the individual the longing for the absolute, which
the salvation religions represent as a transcendent and interventionist
deity and the religion of the overcoming of the world associates with
impersonal, hidden, and unifi ed being. Just as the unlimited longing
for others (accompanied by fear and ambivalence) penetrates and mod-
ifi es our material desires, so the longing for the absolute, inspired by
our confrontation with death and groundlessness, enters into every
part of the life of desire and changes its character. In addiction or ob-
sessional desire, it is displaced onto material objects. In our dealings
with other people, it appears as the doomed attempt (made explicit and
extreme by romanticism) to use our attachments as a salvation from
the experience of the factitiousness— the sheer just so– ness—of our
existence.
Th e second element of insatiable desire— our unlimited longing for
others— is modifi ed by its juxtaposition to the other two elements and
follows directly from the awareness of our situation as one, bounded
self, placed among many other selves, whose depths of subjective expe-
rience we cannot hope to plumb. Th is unlimited longing for others,
which works both through and beyond our erotic life, is riven by the
ambivalence on which I earlier remarked. From this ambivalence we
win release only when we settle, uneasily, into the middle distance of
indiff erence. In that middle distance, however, we can never win the
prize of the unconditional assurance that we seek.
Th is ambivalence is no minor and passing perversion. It threatens to
overshadow the whole of social experience. Combined with the peren-
nial rebirth of our bodily needs and wants and with the inevitable frus-
tration of our longing for the absolute, it threatens to deny us the power
to enter more fully into the possession of life. Th is failure turns readily