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344 becoming more human by becoming more godlike

and freely rebuff ed. It is also resolved, although less fully, by the higher
forms of cooperation.
Th e powers to transcend defi nite structure and to respond to our
incompleteness through love and cooperation are complementary, not
contradictory, features of our experience. To the extent that we experi-
ence ourselves, and act, as puppets of an established regime of life,
thought, or character, we cannot fully engage other people or the world.
In the salvation religions, even the transcendent God is represented
as being incomplete: he needs man, whom he creates— a notion dis-
concerting to the theologians and phi los o phers who struggled to
represent the one and transcendent God in the categories of Greek
philosophy.
By transcending fi nite structure and by living out, through love and
cooperation, the implications of our incompleteness, we open ourselves
both to other people and to the world. Th is, and this only, is the experi-
ence of the divine in which we can hope to share, not the inhuman
powers that the Promethean wants to claim for mankind. It is with re-
gard to this second set of attributes of the divine that we can aspire to
become more godlike by the same means, and in the same fashion, in
which we become more human.
Th e enhancement of life and the sharing of some (but not other) of
the qualities that we ascribe to God represent two convergent descrip-
tions of the goal to which our self- transformation is best directed.

Method and vision

Having stated the central idea informing the view that I here develop, I

now consider the method by which to develop this view and to argue in

its favor. I do so in the form of four methodological preliminaries to the

statement and defense of a vision of the conduct of life. Th ese prelimi-

naries show that the conventional methods of moral philosophy and of

moral casuistry are inadequate to the task. We need, for this purpose,

another way of thinking and of arguing.

A fi rst preliminary deals with the objection that any argument of the

kind that I here propose disregards the distinction between the is and