34 beyond wishful thinkingfrom them, we make the mistake of supposing that we can become
more godlike by becoming less human.
Like the romance of the ascent of humanity, Prometheanism is a false-
hood that resembles a truth, a dead end easily mistaken for a path. Th e
falsehood is power worship, the subordination of solidarity to self-
reliance, and the failure fully to recognize and to accept the incurable
defects in the human condition. Th e truth is that the enhancement of
life is our chief interest. In the pursuit of this interest, we must seek to
die only once. What this purpose implies for the way in which we live,
and in which we deal with ourselves as well as with one another, and
for the relation of this way of living to the reor ga ni za tion of society are
among the major topics of this book. Th e commitment to die only once
inspires a certain way of escaping belittlement. It also guides a response to
each of the incidents in the course of life that threaten to make us ac-
cept belittlement as the corollary of fi nitude: our early expulsion from
the center of the world, our confi nement to a par tic u lar trajectory and
station, and our threatened encasement and slow dying within a shell
of character and compromise. Th e enhancement of life is central to
what I here call the religion of the future.
Th e approach to existence that results from this argument does not
deny the relation of morals to politics. Th e vision informing it can be
enacted only to the extent that we move toward the ideal of deep free-
dom and embrace the institutional changes that the achievement of
this ideal requires. Th e po liti cal program of deep freedom has conse-
quences for the reconstruction of society in the present, not just in a
remote future. Nevertheless, it is a collective task that advances or fails
in historical time, not in the biographical time in which as individuals
we must live and die. Th e less far we go in the transformation of society,
the greater is the weight that must be borne by self- transformation.
Th e vital distinction to be drawn between the insuperable limita-
tions, of mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability, and the corri-
gible defect of our susceptibility to belittlement helps make clear my
aims in this book.
My argument has two central themes. Th e more we refl ect on them,
the better we understand them to be aspects of the same conception.