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What no progress reaches

Progress pushes back the limits of humanity, not those of your life.

Objects to Prometheanism

1. Grant that knowledge has undone many an inevitability. But these victories are the species', and most often statistical: medicine pushes back mortality, it does not abolish your death.
2. Yet the ordeal, you, you live it in the singular: this grief, this illness, this time that will not return. No collective progress gives back the one who is lost, nor will it give you back the age you were. Before this, the ambition to transform stands empty-handed.
3. The Promethean then risks forever deferring peace: as long as a limit remains to be pushed back, he grants himself no rest, and one always remains. By measuring his serenity against his mastery, he condemns himself never to be at peace just where he can do nothing.

Therefore So even an endless progress leaves intact a share of the irreducible, the one where each of us, alone, must come to terms with what he will not change.