A second family of responses to our existential groundlessness, of which the teachings of Buddha and the philosophy of the Vedas are the most important examples, emphasizes the impermanence of all the kinds of being—the natural kinds, as they are sometimes called—through which nature momentarily presents itself, and therefore as well of all the regular relations among these types of beings. Under the changing disguises of nature, it discerns changeless and unified being. This radical impermanence suggests that not only is all phenomenal distinction, including distinction among selves, illusory, but that time itself is only “the moving image of eternity.”
Our sole reliable grounding, according to this view, is the one that enables us to disentangle ourselves, through insight and striving, from the coils of the phenomenal world and to increase our participation in the underlying one reality: the reality of being. Such is also the route to an inclusive compassion, seeing beyond the shallow and ephemeral divisions among us and within the world.
Death confirms, with respect to our embodied existence, the truth of impermanence. It signals our return to the ground of being, from which we never truly departed. Thus, the responses to death and to groundlessness have the same source and work in the same direction.
Here is news that is not as good as the news about our friend the creator and master of the universe and his plan to rescue us from death and groundlessness. It bears a loose resemblance to the outcome of the argument about speculative groundlessness, the view prophesied by Anaximander: “All things originate from one another and vanish into one another, according to necessity, … under the dominion of time.” A major difference may lie in the rejection of the reality of time, often albeit not invariably associated, in this tradition of thought, with the devaluation of phenomenal distinction and of the distinction among selves. If time is illusory, so is history, and our worldly engagements turn out to be either paths without goals or goals without paths.
To accept this way of dealing with our existential groundlessness, we would have to begin by denying or by devaluing the reality of the manifest world and of time. It is one thing to affirm the thesis of impermanence. It is another to diminish the reality of the impermanent so long as it exists. It is in this respect that the news is incredible.
Then, we would have to entertain our merger into hidden and unified being as a substitute for our embodied and individual existence. In exchange for the unique self, we are offered the one mind constitutive of the world. Who would accept such a trade if he could avoid it? It is in this regard that the news is disheartening.
The disadvantages of the exchange are aggravated by the practical consequences of following the road marked out by the approach to reality informing it. Despite the basis that it offers for the assertion of an encompassing kinship with other people, and indeed with the whole of reality, and notwithstanding the call to compassionate action that it may inspire, its fundamental proposal is that we put the phenomenal and temporal world in its place. We are to discount its authority and reality, the better to achieve communion with the one being.
By conforming to this recommendation, we place the theoretical antidote to the experience of groundlessness at odds with the most reliable practical antidote that we have. For if the sense of the dream-like character of existence has any effective remedy, the cure lies in our engagements and attachments rather than in self-help through metaphysics. Nothing can better reconcile us to life than more life. It forms part of the peculiar character of this approach to the world, however, to cast doubt on the (ultimate) reality and authority of the phenomenal and temporal world, the world of history and of distinct human agents, in which such engagements and attachments flourish.
A third approach to our existential groundlessness, illustrated by the teachings of Confucius (as well as by many strands in Western secular humanism), begins from a wholly different point of departure. It accepts our speculative groundlessness but refuses to see it as implying our existential groundlessness. It proposes that we ground ourselves by building a culture and a society bearing the mark of our concerns and fostering our better selves.
The great spectacle of nature is, according to this view, meaningless. We can hope to master a small part of it and to make it serve our interests. We cannot, however, bridge the chasm between the vast indifference of the cosmos and the requirements of humanity. All that we can do is to create a meaningful order within an otherwise meaningless cosmos.
Our best chance of establishing such an order is to refine who we are and how we deal with one another. We can do so through a dialectic between the rules, roles, and rituals of society and the gradual strengthening of our powers of imaginative empathy: our ability to understand the experience of other people and to minister to their needs. By performing our obligations to one another, as chiefly defined by the roles we perform in society, we can secure the humanized structure that nature denies us.
The best among us, those in whom the power to imagine the experience of others has been most developed and the disposition to minister to their needs most pronounced, will no longer need rules, rituals, or roles to guide them in the conduct of life.
This view makes two mistakes that compromise its prospect of disposing of the problem of existential groundlessness: a mistake about society and history and a mistake about the self. The mistake about society and history is to credit any particular social regime with the power to accommodate all the experiences that we have reason to value, or represent the authoritative setting for the discharge of our obligations to one another. Because no social regime can be incontestable, none can hope to provide a grounding for human life that could make up for the grounding that nature denies us.
The mistake about the self is to depreciate a truth about humanity that is revealed in the third irreparable flaw in the human condition (which I next discuss): our insatiability. We demand of one another, as well as of the social and cultural worlds that we build and inhabit, more than we and they can offer. The advancement of our most fundamental material and moral interests regularly requires us to defy and to revise any settled plan of social life. The ultimate source of this power of resistance and defiance is that there is more in us, individually as well as collectively, than there is, or ever can be, in such regimes. We depend on others to make a self, but fear dependence as subjugation: the making and the undoing of the self have similar sources.
It follows from our conflicted relation to the structures of social life, as well as from our ambivalent relation to one another, that the improvement of society cannot amount to the self-grounding of humanity. It will not, unless we deceive ourselves or collude in our own enslavement, assuage the anguish of existential groundlessness.
The provisional conclusion is that none of the ways in which the major civilizations of world history have attempted to prevent speculative groundlessness from turning into existential groundlessness succeed. They are defective as theory, however, only because they are also defective as practice. Their practical consequences reveal their theoretical deficiencies.
The combination of our mortality with our groundlessness imparts to human life its pressing and enigmatic character. We struggle in our brief time in the midst of an impenetrable darkness. A small area is lighted up: our civilizations, our sciences, our works, our loves. We prove unable to define the place of the lighted area within a larger space devoid of light, and must go to our deaths unenlightened.
There