116 humanizing the worldobtaining, through such reconciliation, an assurance that there is a
place for us in the world, and that we are recognized and accepted as
the context- transcending originals that we all know ourselves to be,
despite our groundlessness and our homelessness in the world.
It is this second hope that experiences of despair and of lust place in
jeopardy. Th e disinterested benevolence so dear to the humanizers—
and to the moral phi los o phers in our tradition— then appears as a fall-
back, a putatively safe second best.
On this axis— the axis of the second- best hope— the issue is not sim-
ply more or less reconciliation with other people. It is whether we can
invest our relations to one another with a larger meaning: to assist us in
our eff ort to increase our share in the attributes that we ascribe to the
divine, to become more human by becoming more godlike. When this
hope invites an attempt to turn the beloved into a substitute for God,
and love itself into the antidote to our groundlessness in the world, as it
sometimes did in romanticism, it becomes an illusion and a perversion.
It denies one of the incorrigible defi ciencies in the human condition.
When, however, the lesser hope remains unblemished by this cor-
rupting illusion, yet undiminished in its force, it highlights a distinc-
tion in our attitudes to others that is more fundamental than the move
between love and hatred. It is the swing between passion and indiff er-
ence, between hot and cold. In this respect, love and hatred are not op-
posites; they stand on the same side.
Th e attitude of benevolent detachment, or serene generosity, may
seem natural in the idea realm of the humanization of the world. How-
ever, it bears the same relation to love and hatred that agnosticism has
to theism and atheism. For that reason alone, it would contradict the
aim of entering more fully into the possession of life.
It is only when each of us abandons the perspective of detachment
and regards the relation to the other person as fateful for the self that he
then confronts the full force of his ambivalence to the others whom
he so desperately seeks. Th e posture of distant benevolence had pro-
tected against that force. Th us, the two sides of personal experience—
the movement between love and hatred and between intense need and
disinterested benevolence— are connected.
Any moral psychology that remains blind to these facts will appear
to us as childish and obtuse. It hardly matters whether we read Confu-