the illusion, or compensate for it, but only theoretically; that is to say, by telling ourselves that the world is not in fact the way in which we will continue to experience it.
Death not only brings the conscious self to an end; it also shows, in definitive and incontrovertible form, that the representation of the world as extending outward in space and time from the self was false from the outset. The dead person will not be there to see the demonstration of his error, but the survivors will register what has happened. Each of them will know what awaits him.
With the end of consciousness, it is not just the conscious self that disappears forever; it is the whole world that perishes, as it existed for consciousness. The events and protagonists that filled it all vanish suddenly, in the instant of death, unless their disappearance has been foreshadowed by the ruin of the mind.
The person may flatter himself that he has recorded his experience of the world in lasting words. We know, however, that such records bear only a distant relation to the flow and richness of conscious life; at best, they select from it, or use it, translating it into a language that hardly resembles the real thing. The world of the conscious self cannot escape to the page; it remains trapped in the dying body, which sucks it into the grave and into nothingness.
No afterlife, of the kind promised by the religions of salvation, can—or, if it can, it should not—console us for our mortality. An afterlife would not suffice to give us back our bodies; we would need to be given back the time of the historical world: the struggle and the connection with other people in a time that is irreversible and decisive. To be restored to our bodies and made forever young without being reinstated in the time of history would be to suffer the torture of an eternal boredom. For this reason, portrayals of a paradise of eternal life in the salvation religions remain unconvincing and even repellent. They offer us the shell of immortality without granting us what makes life irresistible.
The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visionary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die.
The frightfulness of death wears another face, alongside its annihilating relation to the good of life and to the experience of consciousness. This third face of the terrors and evils of death has to do with not with its destruction of consciousness and of life, when it occurs, but rather with its effect on conscious life as each of us lives it.
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
