of desire, and the limitations of any attempt to overcome it.
The greatest and fundamental mistake of Prometheanism, however, is its hidden program: to overwhelm, through power and power worship, through the raising up of the strong self over the weak herd, the irremediable defects in our existence, death first among them.
The cure for insatiability, according to the Promethean, is to direct desire inward, to ourselves. Only the infinite self, towering over circumstance, can quench our desire for the absolute, which the believer sought mistakenly in the love of a God who was only the alienated projection of his own self. By such a projection, the believer leaves enslaved what the Promethean proposes to unchain.
The remedy for groundlessness is to ground oneself through successive acts of creation of a form of life for the design of which no man need apply to his fellows. From this self-grounding, forms, values, and practices will result, cleansed of conformity to the social regime. How is this self-creator to know what to create? He will discover himself through non-conformity to his society and resistance to his time. Having discovered himself, he will become, by that same struggle, himself.
The antidote to death, the most important concern of Prometheanism, is a surge of creation. The objects of creation are the elements of such an inner-directed and self-grounded form of life. The aim is to act as if we were not the hapless and inconsolable creatures that we seem to be. It is acceleration and empowerment in the face of an imminent dissolution. It is to fill existence with activities that make time stop.
Prometheanism fails above all because it lies to us about the human condition. Like the religions that it despises, it is a lullaby: a feel-good story, and an effort to arouse the will, in its confrontation with circumstances that the will is unable to alter.
The self-deception has a price. The cost is to undermine the very good of life that it affects to prize. It does so by discrediting the context-bound engagements and attachments on which the quickening and heightening of life depend. It does so as well by treating truth—the truth about our situation in the world—as subsidiary to power. Because the fables to which Prometheanism resorts misrepresent our existence, they cannot guide us in the enhancement of life.
It is the irreparable flaws in existence that help give our lives their shape and potential. It is their terrors that awaken us from the slumber of conformity and bring us to the encounter with time. In turning away from them, we make the mistake of supposing that we can become more godlike by becoming less human.
Like the romance of the ascent of humanity, Prometheanism is a falsehood that resembles a truth, a dead end easily mistaken for a path. The falsehood is power worship, the subordination of solidarity to self-reliance, and the failure fully to recognize and to accept the incurable defects in the human condition. The truth is that the enhancement of life is our chief interest. In the pursuit of this interest, we must seek to die only once. What this purpose implies for the way in which we live, and in which we deal with ourselves as well as with one another, and for the relation of this way of living to the reorganization of society are among the major topics of this book. The commitment to die only once inspires a certain way of escaping belittlement. It also guides a response to each of the incidents in the course of life that threaten to make us accept belittlement as the corollary of finitude: our early expulsion from the center of the world, our confinement to a particular trajectory and station, and our threatened encasement and slow dying within a shell of character and compromise. The enhancement of life is central to what I here call the religion of the future.
The approach to existence that results from this argument does not deny the relation of morals to politics. The vision informing it can be enacted only to the extent that we move toward the ideal of deep freedom and embrace the institutional changes that the achievement of this ideal requires. The political program of deep freedom has consequences for the reconstruction of society in the present, not just in a remote future. Nevertheless, it is a collective task that advances or fails in historical time, not in the biographical time in which as individuals we must live and die. The less far we go in the transformation of society, the greater is the weight that must be borne by self-transformation.
The vital distinction to be drawn between the insuperable limitations, of mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability, and the corrigible defect of our susceptibility to belittlement helps make clear my aims in this book.
My argument has two central themes. The more we reflect on them, the better we understand them to be aspects of the same conception.
The first theme is the relation between our acceptance of death, groundlessness, and insatiability and our rejection of belittlement, for each of us and for all mankind, as both an individual and a collective task, a moral and a political endeavor.
The second theme is the nature and direction of a religion of the future. The religion of the future (if, for the reasons I later invoke, we may call it a religion) is to be created through a series of innovations different in method as well as in content from those that generated the world religions of today, themselves the products of religious revolutions that spread through the world over a thousand-year period, long ago. It is also a religion about the future. It concerns the bearing of the future on the present. It calls us to live for the future as a way of living in the present, as beings uncontained by the circumstances of our existence.
The statement and enactment of such an orientation to life offer our best hope of overcoming belittlement without deceiving ourselves about death, groundlessness, and insatiability. The two themes of the book are two sides of the same reality.
Religion and the flaws in human life
With respect to these flaws in the basic circumstance of existence, everything will never be all right. A simple way of understanding what religion has been in the past and what it can become in the future is to plot its position with respect to this fact.
Imagine three moments. In a first moment, the irremediable defects of our existence do not even come into view. People are concerned chiefly to contend with their dependence on nature, which threatens at each moment to crush them. The point is to deflect the threat and to tell a story about the world that instructs us in the execution of this task. The frightening fundamentals of our existence seem less pressing than the need to do something about the imbalance between the power that nature exercises over us and our power to protect ourselves from nature and to use it to our benefit.
In a second moment, when we have achieved some measure of freedom from complete dependence on nature and developed further the high cultures that offer accounts of our place in the cosmos, the basic flaws in our existence come to the center of our consciousness. We embrace beliefs that put these flaws in a larger context: a context that gives them meaning and shows them to be less terrifying than they appear to be. We assure ourselves that we will find decisive help against the terrors and the realities of death and of groundlessness, that we will be freed from the torment of vain desire, and that we will find a way to live, now and hereafter, that can bring our circumstance-bound existence into accord with our circumstance-transcending identity.
It would be perverse to reduce the religious orientations that have emerged in world history to so many incantations against the fear that the unfixable deficiencies in our existence will always arouse in us. Nevertheless, without appreciating this element in these orientations, it is hard to make sense both of what they have and of what they have not said and accomplished.
In one such line of religious belief and experience, we devalue the reality of the manifest world of change and distinction, affirm the unity of mind and nature, seek to submerge ourselves within real and hidden being, dismiss death as if it were powerless to touch our essential bond to this one and undying being, and nourish in ourselves the serenity and the universal fellow feeling that such a view of the world may help inspire.
In
