becoming more human by becoming more godlike 361is the unstinting ac know ledg ment that we are death- bound, forever in
the dark about the ground of our existence and of reality, and doomed
to yearn ceaselessly for an unconditional and absolute that we cannot
have and are always tempted to mistake for the fi nite and fl awed beings
around us. No triumph can be celebrated by a being who will soon be
annihilated, who must live without grasping the framework of his
life, and whose desires immeasurably exceed the satisfactions that they
can achieve.
As large as these two advantages may be, they are not as signifi cant
as the third benefi t to be enjoyed by abandoning the denial of the truth
about our circumstance. Th e third benefi t is to break the spell of the
sleepwalking, the unthinking routine and repetition, the surrender of
consciousness to the ready- made categories of the established culture,
in which we habitually spend our vanishing time.
Like a man who is wakened in the middle of the night by his execu-
tioners and whose fi nal minutes seem to last and to be crowded with
incident, as his eyes are wide open and his life passes before him, so can
we become when we fi nally decide no longer to deny the reality of our
situation. We are then both the overthrowers and the overthrown; de-
nied the protection of the habits and the illusions that have sustained
the will at the cost of its misdirection, we turn to face and to possess life
so long as it can be ours.
Our terrorization of ourselves, through heightened awareness of our
situation in the world, has no set sequel. It can serve, and in the history
of thought and of experience it has served, as a preliminary to very dif-
ferent next steps. What is remarkable is that for the most part the phi-
los o phers have imagined the sequel to the overthrow in such a way that
it bears little intrinsic relation to the experience that motivated it. It
appears in their thought as an epilogue with no close connection to the
story that it follows. Recall two examples from the history of Western
philosophy, Pascal and Heidegger, both of them focused on the fi rst
and most powerful of the three terrors that I have enumerated: fear of
death.
For Pascal, the condition from which we must arouse ourselves is
that of divertissement, the diversion of our eff orts and devotions to ob-
jects that are, by their very nature, unworthy of our ultimate attention.