Redemption

«Relativists like myself agree that the collapse of Marxism has helped us see why politics should not try to be redemptive. But that is not because there is another sort of redemption available, the sort that Catholics believe is found in the Church. It is because redemption was a bad idea in the first place. Human beings need to be made happier, but they do not need to be redeemed, for they are not degraded beings, not immaterial souls imprisoned in material bodies, not innocent souls corrupted by origin sin. They are, as Nietzsche put it, clever animals, clever because they, unlike the other animals, have learned how to cooperate with one another in order better to fulfill one another's desires. In the course of history, we clever animals have acquired new desires, and we have become quite different from our animal ancestors. For our cleverness has not only enabled us to adjust means to ends, it has enabled us to imagine new ends, to dream up new ideals. Nietzsche, when he described the effects of the cooling-off of the sun, wrote: "And so the clever animals had to die." He would have done better to have written: "And so the brave, imaginative, idealistic, self-improving animals had to die." The notion of redemption presupposes a distinction between the lower, mortal, animal parts of the soul, and the higher, spiritual, imoortal part. Redemption is what would occur when the higher finally triumphs over the lower, when reason conquers passion, or when grace defeats sin. In much of the onto-theological tradition, the lower-higher distinction is construed as a distinction between the part that is content with finitude and the part that yearns for the infinite.»

Richard Rorty, An Ethics for Today, Finding common ground between philosophy and religion