28 beyond wishful thinkinglife, we shall live not only longer but also much better. Our successors
will look back on us and wonder how the human race could ever have
been so fragile, so powerless, and so confi ned.
We, their precarious forerunners, can look forward and share in the
vision and in the joys of this rise. We are entitled to hope that all the
good that we do to one another and to ourselves will live on, as part of
the adventure of mankind.
Th is romance of ascent supplies a response to our trials of belittle-
ment that is inadequate in two distinct ways. It is, in the fi rst instance,
inadequate because unless the individual can share in his own lifetime
in this rise, he casts himself in the role of instrument of the species, as
if we were ants rather than human beings. We allow biographical time
to vanish within historical time, or make it fi gure only as a period of
servitude, even when our indenture is voluntary. We become estranged
from the supreme good, indeed the only good that we ever really pos-
sess: life in the present.
Augustine said that all epochs are equidistant from eternity. What
are we to tell the individual who, in a scheme like those of Comte or of
Marx, happens to have been born far before the consummation of his-
tory? Th at the miseries of slave society or of the capitalist sweatshop
were necessary to the emancipation of an unborn humanity? Th e posi-
tive social theorist, or the phi los o pher of history, who believes that he
has uncovered the hidden script of historical necessity may profess no
interest in such an anxiety. Th e individual, however, who has resorted
to the ascent of humanity as a response to the trials of belittlement
must ask himself how the future empowerment of the species makes up
for his present subjection. If he has come to understand that history has
no such script and that although the future rise of the race is possible, it
is neither inevitable in its occurrence nor foreordained in its content,
his dissatisfaction will be all the greater.
Th e romance of the ascent of mankind is inadequate, in the second
instance, as a solution to the problem of our susceptibility to belittle-
ment because its true and hidden attraction comes from another,
largely unacknowledged quarter. Under cover of being a response to
belittlement, it is in fact also an answer to death. If we cannot bring
ourselves to believe the metaphysic (which I call in this book the over-
coming of the world) according to which the distinct existence of the