struggling with the world 135Th e depth of the self, grasped in this more radical way, accounts for
our obscurity to one another and to ourselves. It helps make us objects
of desire for one another, of an unlimited desire that we are forever un-
able to satisfy. We demand more from the other person than she can
ever give: that his self- bestowal assure each of us an unconditional
place in the world and make up, through love, for our groundlessness.
It is the depth of the other self that turns it into an object of wild
longing. However, this same depth prevents that thirst from ever being
fully quenched. We cannot possess her even if we hold her. As embod-
ied spirit, she eludes us. In so doing, she seems to refer us to God or to
nothing.
- Th e ordinary has more promise than the high- fl own. “I shall pour
out my spirit onto all fl esh.” So speaks God in the Hebrew Bible. For the
struggle with the world, ordinary men and women have the spark of
the divine. Th ey are embodied spirit, unresigned to belittling circum-
stance. Th ey can ascend, whether or not with the help of divine grace.
Th eir power to rise— to increase their share in the attributes of di-
vinity, or to come closer to God, or to the godlike within themselves—
presupposes and produces a subversion of the hierarchies of the noble
and the base in which all the historical civilizations have traded.
It is not just that the lowly are equal to the lordly and that the vulgar
forms of sensibility are as revealing as the hieratic or canonical ones. It
is that the lowly and the vulgar are higher. Th ey are higher because they
are freer from the posturing and the vigilance— over himself and
others— that prevent each of us from coming closer to what Shakespeare
called the thing itself: unaccommodated man. Th e more orphaned or-
dinary men and women are by the established powers of the world, the
more reason they have to fi nd the divine within themselves and to
struggle against the constraints that established arrangements impose
on their rise to a larger life and a higher state of being. Th ey have “noth-
ing to lose but their chains,” if by chains we understand not only the
most overt forms of economic subjugation but also the means by which
a human being may be humiliated and denied his birthright of acces-
sion to a greater existence.
We know all the reasons that may entice us to resignation. Neverthe-
less, the principle introduced by the struggle with the world, whether or