Some day, if we learn to restrain our hatreds and our wars, we shall escape our corner of the universe. We shall establish presence far from our earthly home. Our powers will assume measures and forms that to us now would be unimaginable. Although we will not achieve eternal life, we shall live not only longer but also much better. Our successors will look back on us and wonder how the human race could ever have been so fragile, so powerless, and so confined.
We, their precarious forerunners, can look forward and share in the vision and in the joys of this rise. We are entitled to hope that all the good that we do to one another and to ourselves will live on, as part of the adventure of mankind.
This romance of ascent supplies a response to our trials of belittlement that is inadequate in two distinct ways. It is, in the first instance, inadequate because unless the individual can share in his own lifetime in this rise, he casts himself in the role of instrument of the species, as if we were ants rather than human beings. We allow biographical time to vanish within historical time, or make it figure only as a period of servitude, even when our indenture is voluntary. We become estranged from the supreme good, indeed the only good that we ever really possess: life in the present.
Augustine said that all epochs are equidistant from eternity. What are we to tell the individual who, in a scheme like those of Comte or of Marx, happens to have been born far before the consummation of history? That the miseries of slave society or of the capitalist sweatshop were necessary to the emancipation of an unborn humanity? The positive social theorist, or the philosopher of history, who believes that he has uncovered the hidden script of historical necessity may profess no interest in such an anxiety. The individual, however, who has resorted to the ascent of humanity as a response to the trials of belittlement must ask himself how the future empowerment of the species makes up for his present subjection. If he has come to understand that history has no such script and that although the future rise of the race is possible, it is neither inevitable in its occurrence nor foreordained in its content, his dissatisfaction will be all the greater.
The romance of the ascent of mankind is inadequate, in the second instance, as a solution to the problem of our susceptibility to belittlement because its true and hidden attraction comes from another, largely unacknowledged quarter. Under cover of being a response to belittlement, it is in fact also an answer to death. If we cannot bring ourselves to believe the metaphysic (which I call in this book the overcoming of the world) according to which the distinct existence of the self, and indeed the entire phenomenal and temporal world, are less real than the unified and timeless being from which all emanates and to which all returns, we can nevertheless persuade ourselves to accept a weaker version of that doctrine.
According to this version, we are indeed the real individuals that we seem to be, living in a historical world that is also for real. We shall have to accept death and the dissolution of the body to which consciousness remains tied. We shall nevertheless survive in the onward rush of emergent humanity.
I, the individual, however, will not survive. The future glories of the human race will not elate me now, nor its future absurdities and savageries now cast me down. Each of us can indeed work, out of love or ambition, for the unborn. Only a fool, bent on consolation, no matter what the cost in self-deception, would find in our sacrifice to them rescue from death.
Once the specter of this secondhand immortality vanishes, the romance of the ascent of the human race loses much of its luster. It loses it not only as a compensation for death but also as a cure for belittlement. What we do must make us greater now, even at the price of abruptly shortening the life in which this greatness is manifest. All true greatness may be sacrificial. However, as the beneficiaries of sacrifice, those who have yet to live enjoy no priority over the living.
As a response to the risks of belittlement, rather than as a vision of the future capable of inspiring and informing action in the present, the romance of the ascent of humanity must fail. It performs in this role the part of an illusion that is related to a moral and political truth. The truth to which it is related is that we diminish our susceptibility to belittlement now by beginning to reorganize society now.
We can establish universally an education that recognizes in every child a tongue-tied prophet, and in the school the voice of the future, and that equips the mind to think beyond and against the established context of thought and of life as well as to move within it. We can develop a democratic politics that renders the structure of society open in fact to challenge and reconstruction, weakening the dependence of change on crisis and the power of the dead over the living. We can make the radical democratization of access to the resources and opportunities of production the touchstone of the institutional reorganization of the market economy, and prevent the market from remaining fastened to a single version of itself. We can create policies and arrangements favorable to the gradual supersession of economically dependent wage work as the predominant form of free labor, in favor of the combination of cooperation and self-employment. We can so arrange the relation between workers and machines that machines are used to save our time for the activities that we have not yet learned how to repeat and consequently to express in formulas. We can reshape the world political and economic order so that it ceases to make the global public goods of political security and economic openness depend upon submission to an enforced convergence to institutions and practices hostile to the experiments required to move, by many different paths, in such a direction.
The aim guiding and unifying all these initiatives is the cumulative reformation of the institutions and practices of society in the service of the ideal that was ever paramount for the progressives and leftists: not equality, whether of outcomes or of opportunity, but greatness, the greatness of the ordinary man and woman, the discovery of light in the shadowy world of the commonplace, which is the defining faith of democracy. To this marriage of the effort to lift up the ordinary lives of ordinary people with the method of institutional experimentation and reconstruction I give the name deep freedom.
Deep freedom, rather than the romance of the ascent of humanity, is the collective answer to the problem of belittlement. Because it is within our power to move in the direction of deep freedom, we must never mistake our susceptibility to belittlement for an irreparable defect in human existence, alongside our mortality, our groundlessness, and our insatiability.
Deep freedom offers a legitimate and effective antidote to belittlement. It is also an incomplete one. It has the present, as well as the future, for its terrain. It builds in the penumbra of the adjacent possible, and demands down payments on its dreams. However, like every social construction, it calls on many minds and many wills. It evolves in historical, not in biographical, time. It is not within the purview of the individual, no matter how powerful, to direct. It cannot replace a change in the conduct of life: a change of heart, a change of consciousness, a change in the orientation of existence.
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Prometheanism is what I call the most influential individualist response to the evil of belittlement. Its core is the idea that the individual can raise himself beyond the plane of ordinary existence in which the mass of ordinary men and women allow themselves to be diminished. He can do so by becoming the radical original that he already inchoately is and by turning his life into a work of art. To say that he turns his life into a work of art is to affirm that he raises it to a level of power and radiance at which it becomes a source of values rather than a continual exercise of conformity to values that are imposed on him by the conventions and preconceptions of society.
As with the romance of the ascent of humanity, the text is reacting to belittlement but the subtext is dealing with mortality. Prometheanism beats the drums in the face of death. By exulting in his powers, above all in his power to fashion himself and to become a creator of value, the individual fails to achieve literal deathlessness; he remains condemned to the annihilation of the body and of consciousness. Nevertheless, he may hope to achieve the next best thing to immortality; he lives, among men