religious revolution now 253It falls to us, in our historical situation, to rescue the valuable and
salvageable residue in the untenable idea of the marriage of super-
science with self- help. Instead of super- science, philosophy can become
an exercise in thought of our defi ning power of transcendence. It in-
sists on our prerogative to address the issues that matter most, and that
stand at the verge of what we can think and say. To this end, it crosses
the boundaries among disciplines as well as among methods, and sub-
ordinates method to vision. It continues its work therefore into par tic u-
lar fi elds of knowledge, and seeks to view each of them from the stand-
point of others, while professing to have no Archimedean point from
which it can survey and assess all of them. It strives to develop practices
of inquiry that by facilitating their own revision attenuate the contrast
between routine and revolutionary science, between working within a
framework and working against the framework. Its power is the power
to defy limits, not to see the world with the eyes of God.
Th e self- help that it can hope, without illusion, to inform has no
truck with the denial of our mortality, groundlessness, and insatiabil-
ity. It stands in the ser vice of the enhancement of life, of the widening
of our share in the most important attribute that we ascribe to divinity:
not its omnipotence or omniscience but its radical transcendence. In
this way, it gives practical expression, in the work of thought, to our
determination not to accept belittlement as an inescapable defect in the
human condition.
Understood in this fashion, philosophy cannot play the two roles
that it has ordinarily performed in the history of religion. Th e fi rst role
has been that of servant to theology. An example is Aquinas’s view of
natural reason as a parallel track to revelation, taking us part of the way
to the divine truth. Th e second role has been that of would- be successor
to religion. An example is Kant’s practice of moral philosophy as an
unacknowledged heir to religion, accepting as postulates whatever—
the immortality of the soul and the existence of God as well as the
freedom of the will— seems necessary to sustain hope in the face of the
certainty of death.
Philosophy must exchange these two roles for that of a practice com-
bining a double denial: the denial of defi nitive authority to the estab-
lished disciplines and their methods and the denial of our access to