Prometheanism

1. History is strewn with conquered « inevitabilities »: plague, famine, infant mortality, distances thought impassable. Each time, what was filed under the immutable order of things turned out to be a problem to be solved.
2. This retreat is nothing magical: it comes from knowledge, which grasps causes, and from action, often collective, which takes hold of them. Descartes assigned to science the task of making us « as masters and possessors of nature »; Marx added that men make their own history, through their transforming practice.
3. Before an ordeal, to presume the limit can be crossed is therefore no naivety, it is to draw the lesson of what has already happened. Whoever yields too soon denies himself victories that others, less resigned, knew how to win.

Therefore So refusing to treat the given as final is no pride, it is the condition of all progress: we change only what we first refused to endure.

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.

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.