discover about the world and about our place within it.
The problem of existential groundlessness can be restated simply: all attempts to ground an orientation to existence in an understanding of the world tend to fail. To say that they must forever fail would be to make an unjustifiable claim about the future of human insight and initiative. What we have to instruct us is the history of our struggles to deal with the threat of existential groundlessness, in the space in which philosophy passes over into religion.
Consider three families of efforts to manage this threat. They are the three major spiritual options, dominant over the last two millenniums, that I explore in the next three chapters of this book. The consequences of this survey can be succinctly summarized. The better the news, the less reason there is to believe it. The more credible the news, the less satisfactory it is as a response to the perplexities and anxieties motivating the experience of existential groundlessness.
There appears to be an adverse sliding scale, which opposes our desire to see things as they are to our search for encouragement as well as for guidance. Moreover, even the more credible positions on this sliding scale, the ones that least require us to assent to the unbelievable, are unsatisfactory; if they do not tax our credulity, they nevertheless make light of our powers of resistance and self-transformation.
The most encouraging, and the least believable, news is that we have a friend in charge of the universe. That is the news delivered by the Semitic monotheisms: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Our friend made both the world and us. He did so out of an abundance of his creative, life-giving love. We are formed in his image. Not satisfied to make us, and stand aside, he has a plan for our salvation. In the implementation of that plan, he may even, according to one version of this narrative, have become incarnate in a man a couple of thousands of years ago. He calls us to eternal life and to participation in his being and requires that we change how we live and deal with one another. A community of the faithful will uphold and spread this good news.
This message is not without its terrors. Our spiritual freedom creates the risk that we may fail to heed the message and follow the path. We may be cut off and suffer estrangement from him. Like our salvation itself, this separation may become irreversible and eternal. Nevertheless, the view that we have a friend in charge of the universe is the best news that we could expect to receive, given our impending death and apparent groundlessness. He is the ground of being, and particularly of our being. In him we hope to overcome death.
The trouble is that belief in this narrative may be hard to achieve or to sustain. If it is not simply acquiescence in the conventions of a family and of a culture, it must be the result of undergoing certain experiences. Although these experiences violate our ordinary beliefs about the workings of nature, they may impose themselves on us with compelling if not irresistible force. However, apart from the matter of whether we should allow ourselves to be overwhelmed in this way (in view of our tendency to mistake wishful thinking for insight), we may simply, despite all efforts, not undergo such experiences. Having undergone them, we may fall out of them.
More particularly, reception of the good news requires us to suspend disbelief in a story of redemption from death and groundlessness that presents us with three sets of difficulties. Call them the scandals of reason. The first scandal is that we must accept a sudden and radical interruption of the regular workings of nature, as distinguished from the transformation of everything into everything else and from the change of change. The second scandal is that particular individuals and events have a privileged part to play in a narrative of salvation for all mankind: only the particular plot conveys the universal message. The third scandal is that we must not allow ourselves to be demoralized by the formidable objections that can be leveled against each of the main candidates for an idea of God, from the very standpoint of the belief systems in which this idea plays a certain role: God as person, God as impersonal being, and God as neither person nor being—an unnamable negation. When we are not in the self-induced grip of either social convention or religious enthusiasm, we may conclude that the good news is too good to be true.
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
