becoming more human by becoming more godlike 431and work, looming large in the consciousness of the self because elicit-
ing its capacity for more intense experience and driving a person to
more exertion and greater struggle than any cold calculus of advan-
tage can justify. Th ese two sets of experiences subject us to disappoint-
ment, defeat, and derision. We cannot give ourselves to them without at
least partly lift ing our defenses against other people, despite our am-
bivalence to them. Th e cost of entry into these experiences is to tolerate
a greater vulnerability to other people.
Th is price is evident in love: in the love among people who stand,
with respect to the experience of love, on an equal plane, no matter how
diff erently the world may view them. Th e imposition of this tariff
represents a sign of the superiority of such love to the disinterested be-
nevolence, given from a distance and from on high, that the most infl u-
ential traditions of moral thought throughout world history have gen-
erally and falsely regarded as the gold standard of human relations. In
a more subtle form, the price is charged as well in all the experiences
attending the higher forms of cooperation. Th e most promising coop-
erative practices are the ones that require us to work together without a
rigid allocation of role and responsibility or a stark contrast between
supervision and implementation. Th ey impose greater vulnerability be-
cause they require higher trust. What counteracts this exposure is the
assurance of rights and endowments not dependent upon keeping any
par tic u lar job.
In the work that matters most to the individual, if not to the society,
an increased vulnerability to other people is no less indispensable. A
man who devotes himself to an ambitious task has not simply given
hostages to fortune. He has increased the power of others over him, al-
though he has done so, by an apparent paradox, at the behest of an as-
sertion of freedom. His work is his self made external; others can defeat
or destroy it.
Such love and work supply antidotes to the mummy. Th ey require
that we lower our defenses. A state of greater vulnerability plays an
even larger part in our arousal to a larger life than this requirement may
suggest. To experience such an ascent we must be ready for it: we must
make ourselves patiently and hopefully available to new engagements
and new connections. Th is patient and hopeful availability draws a
broad penumbra of accessible engagement and attachment around our
core experiences of work and love. Like those core experiences, it opens