society in this way can we prevent its fall into a nightmare of domination, and tame selfishness.
Such a program affirms its fidelity to the goals inspiring the past religious revolutions. It upholds, in practice as well as in doctrine, the preeminence of our shared humanity over the divisions and hierarchies within humankind. It repudiates the heroic and martial ethic of lordship and honor, and replaces it with a vision of the attenuation of the contrast between the instrumental and the non-instrumental, the brutal and the spiritualized, the prose and the poetry of social life. It remains far from offering a full-fledged political and moral program. It does, however, describe the starting point of such a proposal.
This program may at first seem not to exemplify the first and most fundamental attribute of those religious revolutions: the establishment of a dialectic between the transcendence and the immanence of the divine in the world. For the overcoming of the world, the transcendent divine is impersonal and unified being, in which the beings that populate our phenomenal experience must find ultimate reality and value. For the humanization of the world, it is the experience of personality itself, dwelling in our social experience but never exhausted by it or reducible to it.
Here is an idea of transcendence that is neither identical to the expression of transcendence in the Semitic religions of salvation nor entirely foreign to that expression. In those religions, the narrative of transactions between God and humanity represents a deepening and a reevaluation, rather than a cancelling out, of our experience of personality and of personal encounter. God himself is represented in the category of personality; the dangers of anthropomorphism stand balanced against the stratagems of the analogical imagination.
That is a sketch of the humanization of the world as a long-standing option within the religious history of humanity, presented in its core beliefs and without regard to the varieties and specificities of its evolution.
The most comprehensive and influential example of this orientation is the teaching of Confucius, as presented in the Analects. The subsequent tradition of neo-Confucianism often departed from this tradition by trying to ground the reformation of society in a metaphysical view of the cosmos. In this respect, it resembled the Hellenistic philosophies that connected a practice of self-help against the flaws in human life to a view of the world.
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
