becoming more human by becoming more godlike 363Th e failure and abandonment of this po liti cal conversion were fol-
lowed by the “turn” of Heidegger’s late philosophy: the outright attempt
to reverse the religious revolutions resulting in the higher religions in
favor of a pagan worship of being. A polytheism was to take the place of
the dialectic of immanence and transcendence that has been central to
every version of the struggle with the world. Under the dispensation of
this paganism, we strive once again for serenity and at homeness in
the radiant world, as the pagan phi los o phers always taught us to do.
We cure ourselves of the sickness besetting all the sacred and profane
versions of that spiritual approach, estrangement from life in the pres-
ent, and open ourselves up to the revelations of immediate experience.
We do so, however, only on the condition of renouncing the attribute
that in fact makes us both human and godlike: our power of re sis tance
to the contexts of life and of thought that shape us.
Th e better sequel to a confrontation with the truth about the human
condition is not Pascal’s or Heidegger’s or any other response that is only
obliquely connected with the source and subject matter of our overthrow
of ourselves. Th e better sequel is our conversion to life undimmed. Th e
terrors of death, groundlessness, and insatiability concern defects in ex-
istence. By facing them, what we get as reward is existence, seen as it re-
ally is, that we may live it as it might become.
Aroused from our daze, we begin to recover the highest good: life now.
We then confront the quandary that we have been taught to appreciate
by the achievements and insights, as well as by the failures and illusions,
of the struggle with the world. We must fi nd a way to live for the future
without being estranged from life in the present.
Living for the future means living as beings whose consciousness and
trajectory are not fi nally determined by the present circumstances of
their existence. In par tic u lar, they are not restricted by the established
structure of society and of thought. Such beings are able to envision a
greater life and to project the path by which they will reach it. All their
deeds and thoughts are premised on insight into the disproportion be-
tween who they are, as context- shaped but also context- transcending
agents, and the situation in which they fi nd themselves. As a result,
they do not regard their susceptibility to belittlement as a fl aw to be ac-
cepted together with their mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability.