religious revolution now 213Achieving a greater life, without Prometheanism
In both the sacred and the secular versions of the struggle with the
world, ac know ledg ment of our transcendence over the social and con-
ceptual contexts that we develop and inhabit is overshadowed by our
estrangement from the sole good that we possess for sure: the present.
As our sacred or secular salvation resides, according to these beliefs, in
the future, the present becomes, to our eyes, incomplete and unsatis-
factory because it is defi cient in the provision of our highest good. Th at
which is highest always remains beyond our grasp. Th at which we can
touch is fatally incomplete: the meaning and value of the part that we
possess compromised and left uncertain by its failure to be combined
with the part that is missing.
Prometheanism—the campaign for a power to be achieved by the
individual through denial of his frailties and triumph over the weak—
represents a misstep in the eff ort to rid ourselves of the burden of es-
trangement. It denies the truth about the unbridgeable rift s in human
life. It makes the exercise of our power to go beyond the immediate
context hostage to the contest for relative advantage. (Th e philosophy
of Nietz sche off ers the uncompromising expression of this view.)
Th e worship of being, or of the radiance of the world, responds to the
experience of estrangement only by denying or by misrepresenting the
imperative— our imperative— of re sis tance to the context. At the limit,
it wants to reverse the premises of the series of religious revolutions
that produced the three spiritual orientations I have earlier discussed.
(Th e philosophy of the later Heidegger provides the best example of
such a response to the sorrows of estrangement.)
What we need and should want instead is to reaffi rm the dialectic of
transcendence and of immanence as an attribute of our humanity, but
to wipe it clean of the taint of estrangement from the present.
Th e starting point for the accomplishment of this task is not a revi-
sion of philosophical ideas, as if we could cease to be estranged from
the present if only we marshaled a diff erent set of abstractions. Th e
point of departure is a determination radically to deepen— beyond the
limits of our present beliefs and arrangements— the transformative