432 becoming more human by becoming more godlikeus to disappointment. It is nevertheless indispensable because it en-
ables us to change, and to escape the hold of the character on the self.
If the self remains in its citadel, anxious to control and heavily de-
fended, it declines in the sources of vitality. To lay the citadel open,
however, is to court danger: a danger inseparable from the enhance-
ment of life.
Here the will has a role. We cannot simply will our self- transformation.
However, we can by acts of will throw ourselves into situations that deny
us some of our protections and that render us more accessible to the tes-
timony of experience and to the voices of others. Such situations make it
easier for the self to escape the mummy. Th e task of the will in the over-
coming of mummifi cation is therefore powerful although it is oblique. A
man holds up a shield against the world and his fellows. He may fi nd it
too frightening to cast the shield down. He may nevertheless contrive to
put himself in circumstances in which his shield is taken away from him.
Th e fulfi llment of this task raises the most delicate problem in the
moral psychology of our response to the perils of mummifi cation. We
are right to fear the guarded self as an anticipation of the corpse and to
lift our defenses the better to enhance life. We must, however, diminish
these defenses in steps, so as not to be overwhelmed by fear and hap-
lessness and thus led to retreat back into the fortifi ed self.
Yet if we seek relative danger and defenselessness for their own sake,
we succumb to an adventurism that cannot in the end provide the es-
cape that it promised. Th e adventurer sets out to lose himself in the
titillating world. However, he may fi nd in that world, at every turn, his
unchanged self. Only the association of such risk taking and striving
with the virtues of divinization— openness to the new and openness to
the other person— endows the move beyond the guarded self with the
power to enhance life.
Th e view of the conduct of life sketched in the preceding pages as a cure
for mummifi cation may give cause for three major objections. I address
them in the apparent order of their apparent force but in the inverse or-
der of their real importance. Th e fi rst two objections result chiefl y from
misinterpretations of the argument. Th e third, however, goes to a real
problem for which there can never be a completely adequate solution.
Th e most likely misinterpretation of this view is also the one that has
least justifi cation. It is that this proposal suff ers from the romantic an-