monotheisms.
The metaphysical idea informing this approach to existence is the affirmation of a universal being lying behind the manifest world of time, distinction, and individuality. Our experience is the experience of the reality of time in this one real world. It is an experience of a world in which there is an enduring structure of different kinds of things and the individual mind is embodied in an individual organism. The philosophy and theology of the overcoming of the world tell us, however, that time, distinction, and individuality are unreal, or that they are less real than they seem to be.
In the history of thought, this view has taken both radical and qualified forms. The radical versions of this view (as we have it, for example, in the Vedas or in Schopenhauer) deny time, distinction, and individuality altogether. They proclaim the illusory character of each of these features of our experience. However, even these radical teachings acknowledge that there must be some limited element of truth in these illusory experiences: enough truth to explain why the world appears to us under the disguise of a differentiated structure of distinct types of being.
Unified and timeless being becomes manifest, according to this radical form of the metaphysic of the overcoming of the world, in a manifold of distinct natural kinds: types of being. Some of these types of being possess sentient life and will. They find themselves housed in a particular body, with a particular fate, susceptible to the ills and risks that attend embodiment, and doomed to die. They may be tempted to form an idea of their own distinction and reality that the truth about the world fails to support. In fact, they are passing expressions of what is really real: the one, timeless being that stands behind the screen of time-bound and divided experience.
But why has unitary and timeless being become manifest in divided and time-bound experience? We cannot know. No philosophical statement of this worldview (not even Schopenhauer’s) has ever provided a developed account of why or how underlying being becomes expressed in phenomena that generate such illusions. Why does there exist not just a world but a world that appears—at least to us—under an aspect contradicting its ultimate reality?
Within the bounds of such a view of the world, this question may remain unanswerable. We dare not attribute to unified being the intentions of a person. We are separated from this ultimate reality by the abyss of embodiment and by all the illusions accompanying it. For the metaphysic of the overcoming of the world, our most reliable connection with the one being and the one mind is the experience of consciousness, understood to soar above the divisions that are imposed on this ultimate reality by the incarnation of universal mind in individual bodies. Nothing in the experience of consciousness explains why universal mind should appear to us thus partitioned in the form of individual minds. Nothing in the metaphysical systems associated with the overcoming of the world accounts for why the supposedly illusory experiences of time, distinction, and individual selfhood should form part of the process by which the truth about unified and timeless being is affirmed. The prevalence of these illusions in our experience seems to represent a superfluous and mysterious detour.
This radical version of the metaphysic of the overcoming of the world rests on two bases: one, cognitive; the other, practical. The latter may be stronger and more appealing than the former.
The cognitive basis of this radical metaphysical doctrine is the claim to make sense of a world in which all distinctions are impermanent. The trouble is that impermanence is not the opposite of being or reality. The distinctions among beings in the world may be real, although they are impermanent, if time is real. Then we must form an account of how things turn into other things, in the course of time. To provide such an account is the proper goal of science.
On the other hand, if time is not real, as the radical philosophical statements of the overcoming of the world commonly claim, we can give no account of transformation. Transformation presupposes time. The distinctions among things, or beings, must therefore be illusory. Moreover, the hold of this illusion on our experience must be explained.
The strong point of this radical version of the metaphysics of the reality of the world is its notion of the impermanence of all types of being. Its weak point is its denial of the reality of time. Impermanence with time affirmed means something very different from impermanence with time denied, and has very different implications for the conduct of life and the significance of history. These contrasts come more clearly into focus when we consider them in relation to the discoveries and disputes of contemporary cosmology.1
There is much in what science has discovered about the universe and its evolution to suggest the impermanence of the structural distinctions that we observe in nature. We are familiar in the life and earth sciences with the principle of the mutability of types: there is, in the history of the earth and of life on earth, no permanent typology of natural kinds, whether the kinds of being are living or lifeless. Every part of this typology is historical; its content changes, albeit discontinuously in time.
The types of being change. So does the character of the ways in which one natural kind differs from another. An igneous rock does not differ from a sedimentary rock in the same way, or in the same sense, that one animal species differs from another.
The mutability of types is in turn connected with a principle of hysteresis or path dependency. The history of mutable types is the concomitant product of many loosely connected sequences of change that cannot persuasively be reduced to one another or inferred from a higher-order explanation: for instance, in Darwinian evolution the relation among the distinct influences of natural selection, of the structural constraints and opportunities created by an established repertory of body types, and of the historical movement and separation of land masses, studied by plate tectonics.
The larger meaning of the principles of path dependency and of the mutability of types becomes clear in the light of a third principle of natural history: the coevolution of the phenomena and of the laws of nature governing them. It is only by sheer dogma, without consequence for the practice of scientific explanation, that we can, for example, suppose that the regularities governing life preexisted its emergence.
We now have reason to believe that these principles, rather than being restricted to the phenomena addressed by the earth and life sciences, apply to the universe as a whole. The most important discovery of the cosmology of the twentieth century is that the universe has a history. The best interpretation of this history is that there was once a time when the rudimentary constituents of nature, as they are now described by particle physics, did not yet exist.
In the very early history of the present universe, nature may not have presented itself as a differentiated structure. There may not have been a clear contrast between states of affairs and laws of nature governing them. Susceptibility to change and the range of the adjacent possible may have been larger than that susceptibility and this range subsequently became in the cooled-down universe studied by the physics that Galileo and Newton inaugurated. It is only thanks to an anachronism, amounting to a cosmological fallacy, that we suppose nature to wear no disguises other than those that it exhibits in the universe as we observe it now, long after its fiery beginnings.
This reasoning may at first suggest that the intransigent form of the metaphysic of the overcoming of the world, rather than being a philosophical fantasy, finds support in the revelations of science. The specific forms of being are evanescent; this metaphysic teaches that it is only being itself that remains. As soon, however, as we introduce into our thinking the idea of the inclusive reality of time, we find that this apparent affinity between the course of modern science and the radical metaphysic of the overcoming of the world starts to vanish.
It is not just the typology of natural kinds that changes in the course of the history of the universe as a whole, as well as in the course of the history of the earth and of life. Change also changes. The ways in which things are transformed into other things are themselves subject to transformation. This susceptibility to uneven and discontinuous change, including to the change of change, is what
