220 religious revolution nowexistence, we readily allow ourselves to be diminished. Life then seeps
away, little by little.
By refusing to turn away from the defects in our existence, we arouse
ourselves from our diminishment of existence. Our belittlement, which
already weighed on us, now becomes intolerable. Every moment that
goes by while we await our doom seems full and precious. Th e sight of
death helps bring us fully to life.
However, once aroused, the sentiment of life, if we could hold it con-
stant in the mind, might overwhelm and paralyze us with joy. Our ex-
ultation at being alive would then prevent us from living. So it is only
by the coexistence of the fear of death with the sentiment of life that we
are able to contain this contrasting terror and joy and to make both
serve our conversion to undiminished existence and to awareness in
the present moment.
We allow ourselves to be terrorized by the prospect of death in the
setting of our groundlessness. Th anks to this terror that we direct against
ourselves, we rise from our stumbling and stupefaction. But to what
end? What comes next?
Our overthrow of ourselves has no self- evident sequel. For Pascal,
the confrontation with death and the vertigo of groundlessness would
open us to a remote and exacting God. Pascal was careful to suspend
faith in Christianity long enough to consider how human life would ap-
pear without it, the better to revive faith by reestablishing it on the ba-
sis of our strongest anxieties and aspirations.
For the later Heidegger, the campaign of self- terrorization and arousal
staged by the early Heidegger in Being and Time would prepare us to
worship the radiance of the world. Th us, the early Heidegger wanted us
to use the terror to commit more fully to a version of Christianity that
had no illusions about the ability of reason to do the work of faith. He
then tried politics and the po liti cal reconstruction of society as the fol-
low- up. Having “taken the right step in the wrong direction,” he aban-
doned all hope of the elevation of life through politics. In the end, he
proposed to take his early campaign of terror and arousal as prepara-
tion for the revival of paganism in the form of a worshipful surrender
to “Being.”
Th ese examples demonstrate the signifi cance of the impulse to face
the fl aws in human life. In the hands of thinkers with contrasting