I name this view Prometheanism by poetic license, for in so calling it I do injustice to Prometheus. He stole fire from heaven to give it to humanity. These Prometheans steal fire to give it to themselves.
It is a position that was given voice by Nietzsche more than by any other thinker. Rousseau and Emerson approached it, but never surrendered to it. The professors of philosophy now like to call it moral perfectionism, only to contrast what Henri Bergson called the morality of aspiration to the morality of obligation. Both its insights and its illusions escape them. Its revealed enemies are not the stunted ethics of duty but rather conformity and belittlement. Its hidden enemy is death.
Accordingly, the overt defect of Prometheanism is its denial of the claims of solidarity in the making of the self. No man makes himself. We are made by the grace of others, through connection with them, in every realm of existence. Because every connection threatens us with loss of freedom and of distinction, even as it may give us the self that we have, or can develop, our dealings with others are fraught with an inescapable ambivalence, the other side of the mimetic character of desire.
The idea that the triumph of the individual over belittlement must take place against the backdrop of a distinction between a small number who become artificers of their own lives and creators of value and a hapless mass that sinks back into conformity and enslavement entangles the winners as well as the losers, the powerful as well as the powerless, in anxious vigilance to uphold or to undermine the arrangements of this dominion.
The specific nature and consequence of such a denial of our dependence upon others becomes clear when we compare Prometheanism to its precursor in the history of moral sensibility, the heroic ethic, prestigious and even predominant, in the cruder form of an ethos of martial valor and self-assertion, in many of the societies in which the present world religions arose. The hero imagines himself ennobled by a task of indisputable worth, often requiring the commission of acts of violence prohibited within the confines of normal social life. It is a theme retaken, in the romantic vision, by the artist in bourgeois society, who subverts the ideals and attitudes supporting the established social regime.
The hero flatters himself that his preeminent worth results directly from such acts rather than from the approval of his nonheroic fellows. In this belief, he is deceived. The heroic task is designed by them and for their benefit. His craving for their approval and admiration is aroused rather than assuaged by the extremity of his actions.
Prometheans imagine that they can solve this problem in the heroic ethic by becoming the inventors of their own selves and thus as well of their own values and tasks. In so thinking and acting, however, they fail to acknowledge the inability of the individual to make or to rescue himself, and the contradiction between the enabling conditions of self-assertion. They also disregard the empty and mimetic character of desire, and the limitations of any attempt to overcome it.
The greatest and fundamental mistake of Prometheanism, however, is its hidden program: to overwhelm, through power and power worship, through the raising up of the strong self over the weak herd, the irremediable defects in our existence, death first among them.
The cure for insatiability, according to the Promethean, is to direct desire inward, to ourselves. Only the infinite self, towering over circumstance, can quench our desire for the absolute, which the believer sought mistakenly in the love of a God who was only the alienated projection of his own self. By such a projection, the believer leaves enslaved what the Promethean proposes to unchain.
The remedy for groundlessness is to ground oneself through successive acts of creation of a form of life for the design of which no man need apply to his fellows. From this self-grounding, forms, values, and practices will result, cleansed of conformity to the social regime. How is this self-creator to know what to create? He will discover himself through non-conformity to his society and resistance to his time. Having discovered himself, he will become, by that same struggle, himself.
The antidote to death, the most important concern of Prometheanism, is a surge of creation. The objects of creation are the elements of such an inner-directed and self-grounded form of life. The aim is to act as if we were not the hapless and inconsolable creatures that we seem to be. It is acceleration and empowerment in the face of an imminent dissolution. It is to fill existence with activities that make time stop.
Prometheanism fails above all because it lies to us about the human condition. Like the religions that it despises, it is a lullaby: a feel-good story, and an effort to arouse the will, in its confrontation with circumstances that the will is unable to alter.
The self-deception has a price. The cost is to undermine the very good of life that it affects to prize. It does so by discrediting the context-bound engagements and attachments on which the quickening and heightening of life depend. It does so as well by treating truth—the truth about our situation in the world—as subsidiary to power. Because the fables to which Prometheanism resorts misrepresent our existence, they cannot guide us in the enhancement of life.
It is the irreparable flaws in existence that help give our lives their shape and potential. It is their terrors that awaken us from the slumber of conformity and bring us to the encounter with time. In turning away from 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 falsehood that resembles a truth, a dead end easily mistaken for a path. The 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. The 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 reorganization of society are among the major topics of this book. The 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 accept belittlement as the corollary of finitude: our early expulsion from the center of the world, our confinement to a particular trajectory and station, and our threatened encasement and slow dying within a shell of character and compromise. The enhancement of life is central to what I here call the religion of the future.
The approach to existence that results from this argument does not deny the relation of morals to politics. The vision informing it can be enacted only to the extent that we move toward the ideal of deep freedom and embrace the institutional changes that the achievement of this ideal requires. The political program of deep freedom has consequences 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. The less far we go in the transformation of society, the greater is the weight that must be borne by self-transformation.
The vital distinction to be drawn between the insuperable limitations, of mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability, and the corrigible defect of our susceptibility to belittlement helps make clear my aims in this book.
My argument has two central themes. The more we reflect on them, the better we understand them to be aspects of the same conception.
The first theme is the relation between our acceptance of death, groundlessness, and insatiability and our rejection of belittlement, for each of us and for all mankind, as both an individual and a collective task, a moral and a political endeavor.
The second theme is the nature and direction of a religion of the future. The religion of the future (if, for the reasons I later invoke, we may call it a religion) is to be created through a series of innovations different in method as well as in content from those that generated the world religions of today, themselves the products of religious