428 becoming more human by becoming more godlikecontradiction is not to devise another theory; it is to live in a diff erent
way and to or ga nize society and culture on diff erent terms.
Th e more distant we remain from the social and cultural ideal of
structures that multiply occasions for their revision and allow engage-
ment without surrender, the greater the weight that is placed on the
moral ambition of the individual, who must prefi gure in his own mode
of life what the species or the nation has so far failed to achieve in its
history. Th e prize is life— more life, not just later, but also right now.
A fi ft h mark of a human existence escaping the mummy is that it be
inclined to conceive, and determined to pursue, large projects— indeed,
the largest project in which the individual, given his situation, his gift s,
and his beliefs, can imagine himself passionately engaged. Such a proj-
ect may be individual or collective. It may be capable of fulfi llment in
biographical or only in historical time. If it is a collective endeavor
that can be achieved only in historical time, the individual may play
only a small part in its progress. Nevertheless, that part must be large
for him: it must provide him with a task and a struggle that engage
him wholly, and speak with an authority that no preset social role can
possess.
Th e largeness that matters here is therefore not mea sured on the
scale of power and infl uence. If it were, success in the campaign against
mummifi cation would be vouchsafed only to a few, who are in fact no
less susceptible to mummifi cation than the many. An aim related to
our most intimate and paramount concerns— the possession of life—
would then remain dependent on fortune and success in the distribu-
tion of natural endowments as well as in the allocation of social place.
A large undertaking, the largest to which a person can devote him-
self, is distinguished by the impalpable mea sure of its relation to the
self: in embracing it, an individual at last stops acting as the function-
ary of a society, a culture, or an age. He acts as a person who is able to
see himself as uncontained by his circumstance and who has found a
light and a passion. He comes to life, and experiences, in the ser vice of
this light and this passion, the life- revealing traits of surfeit, fecundity,
and spontaneity or surprise. Th e task that he has embraced is not life-
giving because it is grand by the standards of the bitch goddess Success.
Rather it is large because it is life- giving.