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178 struggling with the world

in conduct, and in character is loosened and made to serve the perpet-

ual creation of the new.

A self that is oriented in such a direction can better understand and

accept both itself and other selves as the originals that they both want

themselves to become and know themselves already to be. It is better

able to enter, single- mindedly and wholeheartedly, into the present

moment. Without this entry into the present moment, we cannot hope

to become more fully alive, or to give such greater life, in love, to one

another.

We have not done justice to the suppressed orthodoxy about self and
others and distinguished it from its romantic perversion until we have
dealt with its relation to the longing for the absolute with which we re-
spond to mortality and groundlessness. Th is longing represents the
second aspect of the romantic deviation; it combines, as does the fi rst, a
truth with a falsehood. Love becomes the or ga niz ing principle of the
moral life in a world of belief that sees the individual as irreducible to
role and context. Th e self has unlimited depth. It cannot be read out of
the script of a social role or of a position in the hierarchy of classes and
castes. It cannot even be identifi ed with the rigidifi ed form of the per-
son that is his character. For these reasons, it can never become fully
transparent to other people or even to itself.
Th e self that has discovered its own depth longs to affi rm its power of
transcendence over context. It struggles with the disproportion be-
tween the infi nity of its aspirations and the fi nitude of its circumstance.
As a result, it remains forever susceptible to belittlement: the triumph
of the limiting circumstance over the unbowed spirit. Our relations to
one another are penetrated and transformed by an unlimited desire for
the unlimited. In par tic u lar, we seek from one another an unconditional
assurance that there is a place for us in the world.
Th is is the demand that a child makes to his parents but that, as an
adult, he continues to make to those from whom he seeks love. It is a
demand that is destined to be frustrated: we can never give enough to
the other person, or receive enough from her, to provide such assur-
ance. A being that has discovered his transcendence over context and
role and who seeks connection with other such beings will always want
more than he can receive.