Thinkers sympathetic to this tradition have often tried to ground it in a metaphysical doctrine rather than to conform to the discipline of an anti-metaphysical metaphysic. None have succumbed to this temptation without paying a price damaging to the force of this response to the world. The price lies in the need to make the metaphysical conception shape the existential imperative—the message about how to live; otherwise the pretense of inferring the latter from the former will seem an empty gesture.
However, such a metaphysical system risks being no more than a fairy tale, easy to devise and easy to reject. Persuasively to inform the project of humanizing the world, it will need to be much more specific in its claims about the structure and evolution of nature and society than the philosophies that inform the overcoming of the world. For these philosophies, it may be enough to propose a radical simplification that either denies phenomenal distinction and temporal change or reinterprets them against the backdrop of the supposed archetypes of manifest reality. A metaphysic operating under such constraints cannot appeal to a dramatic historical narrative of dealings between God and humanity like the stories central to the Semitic monotheisms. Such narratives invite a shaking up of the social order, a rebellion against conventional morality and its role-encoded standards of conduct.
It is an outcome that conflicts with the humanizing program; it brings struggle instead of humanization. Although a metaphysic intended to support the humanization of the world may speculate about the reasons for which nature and society take one form rather than another, it remains bereft of the experimental practices, the empirical disciplines, and the technological tools of modern natural science. It is condemned to be a waking dream: an argument in which the conclusion is already set and only the premises remain open to exploration.
Moreover, the special pleading required to provide the humanization of the world with a metaphysical prop faces the speculative humanizer with a dilemma. If he leaves loose the connection between metaphysics and morals, he makes the prop seem a transparent attempt to conceal the failure of the humanizing effort to be grounded in any feature of natural reality outside society and humanity. If, however, he insists on the tightness of the link between morals and metaphysics, he not only draws attention to the flimsiness and arbitrariness of the metaphysical conception but also risks imposing on the moral view a direction alien to the motivations inspiring it. The invocation of a privileged, suprahuman or extrasocial perspective on humanity and society threatens to blunt our claims on one another. It dims the significance of our relations to our fellows by making these attachments and commitments seem secondary to our citizenship in a cosmic order.
So it is that in the rerouting of the humanization of the world into metaphysics, a doctrine of human connection, translated into a role-based conception of our duties to one another, has regularly given way to a quest for individual perfection, or to a search for composure in the face of suffering and death, or to a calculus and classification of the most reliable pleasures. Self-help takes the place of solidarity. Eudaimonism and perfectionism—the happiness and the improvement of the individual—become our guides. Other people recede into the distance; at best they become the beneficiaries of a superior benevolence, not the targets of a devotion that we express and sustain through the fulfillment of our role-based responsibilities.
The intended result becomes ever less the humanization of a meaningful social world as a bulwark against meaningless nature. It becomes ever more the rescue of the individual from the injustices of society as well as from the sufferings of the body, thanks to a superior access to fundamental truths. Instead of being reformed and humanized, society is dismissed; it is pushed into the background of an existential ordeal that we must overcome through the marriage of virtue to philosophical insight. Such was the course of neo-Confucianism, of the Hellenistic metaphysics of self-help, and of all the many ways in which the proponents of the idea that human beings create meaning in a meaningless world wavered in their doctrine.
Making meaning in a meaningless world
Free from the failed attempt to base its response to the defects of the human condition on the vision of a cosmic order, the humanization of the world is made out of three building blocks. Each of the three is vital to its conception and to its program.
The first component in this orientation to existence is the link that it establishes between the meaninglessness of nature and the human construction of meaning in society. The human world must be self-grounded in a void. It cannot be grounded in anything external to itself—whether extra-human nature or supra-human reality—that would guide and encourage us.
We are natural but nevertheless context-transcending beings. Our embodiment, however, fails to establish our kinship with inhuman nature. We can explore nature around us, extending our powers of perception with the physical tools of science. We can develop our understanding of the relations among phenomena with the conceptual tools of mathematics. When, however, we project our concerns unto nature, and suppose it sympathetic to our purposes and intelligible from within, as if animated, we deceive ourselves.
Viewed from one angle, nature has favored us because we live. Viewed from another, it is set against us because we are doomed to die without any chance to grasp the ultimate nature of reality or the origin and end of time. We know, however, that our reckoning of the favors and burdens of nature is wholly one-sided; there is no one here but us to whom to make complaint or give praise. There is no mind on the other side, neither the universal mind invoked by the overcomers of the world nor the transcendent mind of the living God. Mind exists exclusively as embodied in the mortal organism.
Only our own efforts can create meaningful order—meaningful to us—within the meaningless void of nature. Meaning is constructed in culture and expressed and sustained in society in networks of relations among individuals. Each of us will die. Each of us stands at the edge of the precipice of groundlessness. Each of us remains subject to the call of wild desire. Each of us must content himself with a particular course of life and a particular place in society, and resign himself to being denied a second chance. However, within the space defined by these unsurpassable limits, we can shape a collective order that is made in the image of our humanity, and by the standards of our concerns, rather than in the image of meaningless nature.
The supreme expression of the social creation of meaning within the meaningless void of nature is law: law understood as the institutionalized life of a people, developed from the bottom up. Through the self-regulation of society as well as from the top down, through state-made order. It is in law that a coercive division of labor becomes an intelligible and defensible plan of cooperation.
Although the struggle over the terms of social life never ceases, it can be contained. Law is the expression of this truce. However, if such an armistice is all that law were, it could be understood only as the repository of a haphazard correlation of forces between the winners and the losers in earlier contests for advantage. Law must be revised and reinterpreted as the repository of a way of organizing social life. Such a scheme will transform the generic idea of society into a series of images of association: views of how the relations among people should and could be arranged in different domains of social life. Such images of association will in turn inform the ideas used to guide the elaboration of law in context.
Our situation and our task
The second component of the humanization of the world is the view of the work to be done: our quandary, our task, and the resources available to us to execute it.
Interdependence and the imagination of others are constitutive features of our humanity. We depend on one another for everything, and remain helpless without the cooperation of others. The development of the capabilities of mankind in every realm and at every level depends on the progress of our cooperative practices and capabilities.
Our imaginative access to other people deepens the significance of interdependence. The consciousness of the individual, however, although expressed by a mind embodied in an individual organism, cannot adequately be understood as