struggling with the world 179
Th e penetration of love by this reach for the infi nite, for the unlim-
ited, is a consequence of the ideas and experiences that give to love, as I
have described it, an or ga niz ing role in our moral experience. Th at love
comes to bear the imprint of this longing for the absolute is not a con-
sequence of romanticism; it is a result of the forms of life and of thought
that mark the struggle with the world in all its variations. Th e romantic
distortion consists in mistaking personal love for a way of overcoming
our groundlessness, experienced in the shadow of our mortality.
Groundlessness is the inability to understand the basis of our exis-
tence, to look into the beginning and the end of time, to reach, in the
chain of our thoughts, presuppositions that are beyond questioning. It
is not a romantic illusion to demand assurance from the beloved that
she loves us and that through her love we will feel reaffi rmed in the
sentiment of being. It is a romantic illusion to take this demand, and
the fragmentary responses that it may elicit from the beloved, as a solu-
tion to the problem of groundlessness.
Under the spell of this illusion, we imagine love as a release from
groundlessness and as an entrance into a charmed world in which we
can ground ourselves. Th e beliefs that trap the romantic imagination in
this illusion are closely connected to the other side of romanticism: its
war against routine and repetition. Liberated from the bonds of the
everyday world, the romantic agent imagines himself admitted to a
paradise in which he can at last be fully human. Th at world, unlike the
real world of nature and society, works according to the logic of our
deepest and most intimate concerns. It is neither indiff erent nor opaque.
If we acknowledge that despite this supposed release from ground-
lessness we remain doomed to die, the attractions of this anti- world—
erected on the basis of the denial of the workings of society and of
nature— will be all the greater. Our self- grounding, through the ro-
mantic rebellion against established structure, will seem to be the sole
available compensation for our mortality. In the romantic imagination,
the extravagant view of love as self- grounding goes together with the
fear and the intimation of death.
We deny the incurable fl aws in human life, however, only at the cost
of damage to our humanity. So it happens with romanticism, in both its
aspects— of refusal of repetition and of understanding of love as escape
from groundlessness. We will be groundless so long as we are human.