becoming more human by becoming more godlike 393
Recall the features of the higher forms of cooperation: the ability to
connect people regardless of their place in a set scheme of social divi-
sion and hierarchy, the weakening of any contrast between the respon-
sibilities to defi ne tasks and to implement them, the use of machines to
save our time for the activities that we have not yet learned to repeat,
and the enhancement of a zone of protected immunities and capabili-
ties as a spur to putting everything else up for grabs. Every instance of
such a higher form of cooperation amounts to the practical prophecy of
a way of or ga niz ing society. Th e vital test of its success is its power to
reform and to renew itself against the widest range of varied and chang-
ing circumstance.
Th ese three instances of reconciliation— love, community, and
cooperation— lie on the same continuum of moral experience. All three
of them rest on the same double requirement. Th e fi rst requirement is
the ac cep tance of heightened vulnerability to other people: to the be-
loved, to the other members of a community of diff erence, to those
with whom one cooperates when cooperation can no longer conform to
an invariant and hierarchical scheme. Th e second requirement is the
cultivation of our ability to imagine alien experience, the experience of
those whose otherness we discovered when we underwent our painful
decentering. To develop this faculty is one of the powers of poetry, of
imaginative literature, and of the humanities.
It is only when we have taken this path— the only real and reliable
sense of salvation— that we can hope for an altruism wiped clean of
cruelty. Only then can generosity be both guided and redeemed by the
imagination of otherness.
Th e course of life: downfall
A second formative incident in the course of life is our evasive encoun-
ter with death and groundlessness. It takes place not long aft er our de-
centering, and results in a second and more decisive downfall. Instead
of seeking vainly to reverse it, our interest is to recognize in it one of
the conditions of a higher existence.
Our groundlessness would, I argued at the beginning of this book,
have a completely diff erent meaning if it were not accompanied by the