out of love or ambition, for the unborn. Only a fool, bent on consolation, no matter what the cost in self-deception, would find in our sacrifice to them rescue from death.
Once the specter of this secondhand immortality vanishes, the romance of the ascent of the human race loses much of its luster. It loses it not only as a compensation for death but also as a cure for belittlement. What we do must make us greater now, even at the price of abruptly shortening the life in which this greatness is manifest. All true greatness may be sacrificial. However, as the beneficiaries of sacrifice, those who have yet to live enjoy no priority over the living.
As a response to the risks of belittlement, rather than as a vision of the future capable of inspiring and informing action in the present, the romance of the ascent of humanity must fail. It performs in this role the part of an illusion that is related to a moral and political truth. The truth to which it is related is that we diminish our susceptibility to belittlement now by beginning to reorganize society now.
We can establish universally an education that recognizes in every child a tongue-tied prophet, and in the school the voice of the future, and that equips the mind to think beyond and against the established context of thought and of life as well as to move within it. We can develop a democratic politics that renders the structure of society open in fact to challenge and reconstruction, weakening the dependence of change on crisis and the power of the dead over the living. We can make the radical democratization of access to the resources and opportunities of production the touchstone of the institutional reorganization of the market economy, and prevent the market from remaining fastened to a single version of itself. We can create policies and arrangements favorable to the gradual supersession of economically dependent wage work as the predominant form of free labor, in favor of the combination of cooperation and self-employment. We can so arrange the relation between workers and machines that machines are used to save our time for the activities that we have not yet learned how to repeat and consequently to express in formulas. We can reshape the world political and economic order so that it ceases to make the global public goods of political security and economic openness depend upon submission to an enforced convergence to institutions and practices hostile to the experiments required to move, by many different paths, in such a direction.
The aim guiding and unifying all these initiatives is the cumulative reformation of the institutions and practices of society in the service of the ideal that was ever paramount for the progressives and leftists: not equality, whether of outcomes or of opportunity, but greatness, the greatness of the ordinary man and woman, the discovery of light in the shadowy world of the commonplace, which is the defining faith of democracy. To this marriage of the effort to lift up the ordinary lives of ordinary people with the method of institutional experimentation and reconstruction I give the name deep freedom.
Deep freedom, rather than the romance of the ascent of humanity, is the collective answer to the problem of belittlement. Because it is within our power to move in the direction of deep freedom, we must never mistake our susceptibility to belittlement for an irreparable defect in human existence, alongside our mortality, our groundlessness, and our insatiability.
Deep freedom offers a legitimate and effective antidote to belittlement. It is also an incomplete one. It has the present, as well as the future, for its terrain. It builds in the penumbra of the adjacent possible, and demands down payments on its dreams. However, like every social construction, it calls on many minds and many wills. It evolves in historical, not in biographical, time. It is not within the purview of the individual, no matter how powerful, to direct. It cannot replace a change in the conduct of life: a change of heart, a change of consciousness, a change in the orientation of existence.
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Prometheanism is what I call the most influential individualist response to the evil of belittlement. Its core is the idea that the individual can raise himself beyond the plane of ordinary existence in which the mass of ordinary men and women allow themselves to be diminished. He can do so by becoming the radical original that he already inchoately is and by turning his life into a work of art. To say that he turns his life into a work of art is to affirm that he raises it to a level of power and radiance at which it becomes a source of values rather than a continual exercise of conformity to values that are imposed on him by the conventions and preconceptions of society.
As with the romance of the ascent of humanity, the text is reacting to belittlement but the subtext is dealing with mortality. Prometheanism beats the drums in the face of death. By exulting in his powers, above all in his power to fashion himself and to become a creator of value, the individual fails to achieve literal deathlessness; he remains condemned to the annihilation of the body and of consciousness. Nevertheless, he may hope to achieve the next best thing to immortality; he lives, among men and women who remain below, on a lower rung of the ladder of existential ascent, as if he were one of the immortal gods. The clearest sign of this election—in truth, a self-election or a self-crowning—is change in the experience of time. It is our absorption in activities that, without denying our mortality and finitude, suspend for us the oppressive passage of time. Thus, we have a taste of eternity without leaving our mortal bodies.
I name this view Prometheanism by poetic license, for in so calling it I do injustice to Prometheus. He stole fire from heaven to give it to humanity. These Prometheans steal fire to give it to themselves.
It is a position that was given voice by Nietzsche more than by any other thinker. Rousseau and Emerson approached it, but never surrendered to it. The professors of philosophy now like to call it moral perfectionism, only to contrast what Henri Bergson called the morality of aspiration to the morality of obligation. Both its insights and its illusions escape them. Its revealed enemies are not the stunted ethics of duty but rather conformity and belittlement. Its hidden enemy is death.
Accordingly, the overt defect of Prometheanism is its denial of the claims of solidarity in the making of the self. No man makes himself. We are made by the grace of others, through connection with them, in every realm of existence. Because every connection threatens us with loss of freedom and of distinction, even as it may give us the self that we have, or can develop, our dealings with others are fraught with an inescapable ambivalence, the other side of the mimetic character of desire.
The idea that the triumph of the individual over belittlement must take place against the backdrop of a distinction between a small number who become artificers of their own lives and creators of value and a hapless mass that sinks back into conformity and enslavement entangles the winners as well as the losers, the powerful as well as the powerless, in anxious vigilance to uphold or to undermine the arrangements of this dominion.
The specific nature and consequence of such a denial of our dependence upon others becomes clear when we compare Prometheanism to its precursor in the history of moral sensibility, the heroic ethic, prestigious and even predominant, in the cruder form of an ethos of martial valor and self-assertion, in many of the societies in which the present world religions arose. The hero imagines himself ennobled by a task of indisputable worth, often requiring the commission of acts of violence prohibited within the confines of normal social life. It is a theme retaken, in the romantic vision, by the artist in bourgeois society, who subverts the ideals and attitudes supporting the established social regime.
The hero flatters himself that his preeminent worth results directly from such acts rather than from the approval of his nonheroic fellows. In this belief, he is deceived. The heroic task is designed by them and for their benefit. His craving for their approval and admiration is aroused rather than assuaged by the extremity of his actions.
Prometheans imagine that they can solve this problem in the heroic ethic by becoming the inventors of their own selves and thus as well of their own values and tasks. In so thinking and acting, however, they fail to acknowledge the inability of the individual to make or to rescue himself, and the contradiction between the enabling conditions of self-assertion. They also disregard the empty and mimetic character
