A headlong rush

The sense of a permanent power of transcendence over all limits — of openness to the infinite — is…inseparable from the experience of consciousness. However, this sense is countered by two other circumstances that work together to shape our experience: the anticipation of death and the impenetrability of existence…immeasurably increase each other’s terrors, closing every exit to escape or solace. Together, they impart to our lives the character of a headlong rush, from one enigma to another, seemingly endless and open at the start, then startlingly brief when reviewed in memory toward the end. Everything in this combination of mortality and impenetrability underlies our imprisonment within the all too finite particulars of the decaying body and of our accidental place in society and in history.

— from The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound by Roberto Unger (2007)

Excerpts from Unger's Religion of the Future (2014) were published by openDemocracy here.

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