← See the axis · Scope of action

Overreach and the world's recoil

By striving to extend your mastery without end, you multiply the occasions of being defeated.

Objects to Prometheanism

1. The Promethean project measures wisdom by what one manages to change. But there is always more to change: each limit pushed back uncovers another, and the effort never knows rest.
2. Above all, the real has the last word. Illness, grief, aging, death end up foiling the best-laid plans; and the nature we thought we had tamed sometimes reminds, harshly, those who force it, like those antibiotics whose overuse has bred bacteria they no longer cure.
3. Whoever has placed all his peace in the power to transform finds himself without recourse the day he runs up against the untransformable. Overreach, what the Greeks called hubris, called down a punishment in their tragedies: not out of superstition, but because it forgets the measure of things.

Therefore So the ambition to master everything, for want of acknowledging a share of the irreducible, prepares its own defeats and the bitterness that follows them.