118 humanizing the worldfrom a half- conscious life, of convention, compromise, and routine, to
a refusal of death by installments. It is not enough, in this view, the
view of the religion of the future, to recognize the incurable defects in
the human condition, only then to contrive to forget them as quickly
and as completely as possible. It is necessary to use our confrontation
with them as a step in our rise.
Our mortality, unrelieved by any prospect of discerning the ground
of existence, will make life, in every moment, all the more precious.
Our groundlessness, lived under the shadow of our mortality, will dis-
credit and undermine any attempt to ground a regime of society or of
thought in a story about the nature of things. Our insatiability will teach
us that the fi nite ends for which we grasp are never enough to content
us, but only so many stopping points along the way.
All the idols of the world will shrink in the presence of such an
arousal. We will be ready to ask ourselves how we should live and think
once we remember the truth about our existence rather than contriving
to forget it. Lived wide awake, if we experience it as it in fact is, human
life is placed at the edge of the precipice of death and absurdity, and
transfi gured by our desire for more than any fi nite reality can off er.
In turning away from what is irreparable in our circumstance, the
humanization of the world also fails to show the way to the fi xing of
what we can repair: our susceptibility to belittlement. As a result, it fails
to do justice to the idea that has come to exert a revolutionary infl uence
throughout the world: the notion that every man and woman shares in
attributes that we ascribe to God (whether or not such a God exists) and
that we can increase our share in those attributes by changing the or ga-
ni za tion of society and by re orienting the conduct of life.
Disseminated by the Near Eastern salvation religions, this belief
then acquired a life in de pen dent of them in the secular programs of po-
liti cal and personal liberation that have set the whole world on fi re. It is
the central tenet of democracy, if democracy is viewed as more than a
project for the or ga ni za tion of politics. It is a major theme of romanti-
cism in both the high and the pop u lar culture, if romanticism is seen as
a continuing presence in the consciousness of recent societies, not just
as an ephemeral moment in the history of moral sensibility.
Th e conception of the self as embodied spirit, always able to tran-
scend the social and conceptual regimes that it engages and always