We can best understand this effect in the form of a dilemma. One horn of the dilemma is what happens when we face death. The other horn is what happens when we fail to face it.
To face death squarely and persistently, without help from the feelgood theologies and philosophies that abound in the history of religion and of metaphysics, is to look straight at a sun that Pascal assured us, with reason, cannot be long observed without danger. It is to live in fear of the incomprehensible and awful end before us.
However, to contrive to forget that we will die—to turn wholly away from death or at least as far away from it as we can—is to risk losing the most powerful antidote to a life of routine, convention, conformity, and submission—to a somnambulant life, which is to say, to a life that is not fully possessed and that exhibits only in diminished form the attributes of life: surfeit, spontaneity, and surprise. It is the prospect of death that gives life its decisive, irreversible shape and makes time, our time, full of weight and consequence. Aroused by the awareness of death, so closely connected to the sentiment of life, we can conceive an existence of striving and resist the automatisms, the habits, the endless little surrenders that rob us, by installments, of the substance of life.
As we confront this dilemma, we have reason for hope. If we were able fully to awaken to life and to grasp its qualities and possibilities, we might be just as overtaken by a paralyzing sentiment as if we held death firmly in our line of vision. That each of us was snatched out of nothingness before being returned to it (or promoted, according to some of the historical religions, to the perpetual ordeal of an uneventful timelessness) is an enigma of the same order as the riddle of mortality. It is also a fortune so great that it may be as hard to consider steadily as our fall toward death. Life, too, seen for what it is, or can become, would be a sun blinding us through an exultation that might paradoxically inhibit our ability to seize its benefits.
So we must run back and forth between these two suns in our firmament—the presentiment of death and the awareness of life—and avoid being transfixed by either of them. If we are lucky, in this uncertain middle distance, we may form attachments and projects that enhance the sentiment of life. However, even as we try our luck, death comes to us, and brings our experiment to an end.
Groundlessness
We are unable to grasp the ground of being, the ultimate basis for our existence in the world as well as for the existence of the world. We cannot look into the beginning and end of time. In our reasoning, one presupposition leads to another and one cause into another. We never reach the bottom; the bottom is bottomless.
The root experience of groundlessness is astonishment that we exist, that the world exists, and that the world and our situation in it are the way they are rather than another way. The way they are seems to bear no relation, other than a relation of indifference, to our concerns. Indeed, on the concern that overrides all others—attachment to life—nature is not simply indifferent; it is unforgiving. It has condemned each of us to destruction.
There is nothing in what we can understand about the workings of nature, when we do not allow ourselves to be deceived by cowardice, self-deception, wishful thinking, and power worship, that encourages us in the pursuit of our loves and devotions, or even provides a basis on which to understand their place and value in the history and structure of the universe. Thus, astonishment is accompanied, in the core experience of groundlessness, by awareness of the incomprehensibility, and of the sheer alienness, of the world in which we find ourselves.
Consider two distinct aspects of this experience: speculative groundlessness and existential groundlessness. It is the latter that counts as an ineradicable flaw in the human condition. Its significance, however, becomes clear only when it is seen against the background of the former.
Speculative groundlessness goes to the limits of what we can hope to discover about the universe and about our place in its history. Existential groundlessness has to do with the limits to our ability to overcome the disorienting implications of an inescapable fact: we play a part—a tiny, marginal part—in a story that we did not, and would not, write. We can edit that story marginally, but we cannot rewrite it. In fact, we can barely understand it; we survey it only in fragments. Consequently, our decisions about what to do with our brief lives can have no basis outside ourselves. We are, in this sense, ungrounded.
The most salient feature of the world is that it is what it is rather than something else. The most ambitious projects of understanding of the world are those that seek to explain why it must be the way it is and could be no other way and even why something exists rather than nothing. If these endeavors had any merit or prospect of success, our speculative insight into the world might provide a response to our existential groundlessness. They do not.
Suppose, for example, that we seek to list certain features that would make one world more probable than another, enlisting in this effort the semblance of a calculus of probability. We might, for example, imagine that a full universe, with a great richness of manifestations, is more probable than a meager one. It is an idle speculation.
The observed universe is, so far as we know or could ever know, the only universe, although it may have predecessors. The idea of a multitude of other universes is not evoked by any observation, nor could it be, for these other universes would have no causal communion with ours. It is merely designed to fill a hole in certain scientific theories (such as in string theory in contemporary particle physics) that make many universes possible and therefore find it convenient to imagine all of them actual. With only one actual universe, and with no basis other than the limitations and predilections of the human mind to distinguish possible and impossible universes, we lack the conditions for a well-formed estimation of probabilities.
We come to recognize speculative groundlessness by facing the interminable and contestable character of the presuppositions on which all knowledge and belief rest. Every claim about the world relies on assumptions, and each layer of assumptions on further layers of assumptions. We cannot justifiably bring this layering of presuppositions to a halt by an appeal to self-evidence, for example, to the self-evident status of the axioms of Euclidean geometry. Our sense of self-evidence remains parasitic on our perceptual apparatus, which evolved in our embodied organisms to serve limited, practical goals.
Our more comprehensive claims about the world have an irreducible pragmatic residue. If we cannot bring the chain of our presuppositions to an end by an appeal to self-evidence, we can nevertheless justify the conditional forms of understanding with which we are left by invoking the predictions and initiatives that they inform, motivated by particular interests. The hard core of speculative groundlessness is the existence of intractable limits to our natural knowledge of the natural world. Science, equipped with technology, extends these limits, but it does not abolish them. With its help, we continue to view the world from the vantage point of our embodied minds.
The failure of the ontological argument for the existence of God in the history of Western philosophy and theology is a particular expression of a wider problem.1 Nothing in the character and content of what we have discovered about nature alters the brute facticity of the world: the world just happens to be one way rather than another. If there is only one universe at a time, its most important attribute is that it is—that it just happens to be—what it is rather than something else.
When we put aside the fictions of a metaphysical imagination determined to overstep the bounds of understanding, usually in the service of an effort to reassure us and to reconcile us to our lot, we encounter the dominant undertaking of modern science from Galileo and Newton to today: to discern the immutable laws governing nature, expected to be written in the language of mathematics. The unified understanding of these laws would then fix the outer limit to our comprehension of nature. There are, however, two grave limitations to this approach to the most general features of reality.
The first limitation is that its methods are suited to the exploration of parts of nature rather than of the universe as a whole. What one might call the Newtonian paradigm of scientific inquiry studies parts of reality, regions of the universe. In each of these regions, it distinguishes stipulated initial conditions marking out a configuration space within which phenomena change according to laws