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 is an unequal relation between our groundlessness and our mortality. The latter is a more fundamental defect in the human condition than the former. If we enjoyed eternal and perennially rejuvenated and embodied life in historical time, our inability to discern the ground of our existence might not seem so daunting. We could always hope to make progress later on, in discovering the ground of our existence. We would always be brought back to the concerns arising out of the next moment of existence. Our groundlessness might seem what it does to some philosophers: a theoretical curiosity. It would, in the terms of the preceding argument, amount to a merely speculative rather than an existential groundlessness. Although it would remain baffling, it would lose much of its terror.
If, however, we did understand the ground of existence, our understanding might or might not assuage our fear of death. Whether it would or not would depend on our conclusions. There are understandings that might calm our fears: those, for example, that assure us that a friend of ours is in charge of the universe, that he has given us life, and that he will deliver us to death only to endow us with yet higher life but also those that invite us progressively to submerge ourselves in the self-making and the self-perfection of impersonal being. We have many reasons desperately to want one of these views to be true.
A central issue in the history of religion is whether it will remain content to perform the role of providing the consolation that we desire. A subsequent issue is what we are entitled to hope for if we cannot rest assured in the expectations that those consoling beliefs hold out for us. Both issues form major concerns of the argument of this book.
We must die without grasping reasons for our existence other than those fragments of necessity and chance that scientific inquiry suggests to us. It does not seem that the growth of scientific knowledge ever would or could alter this circumstance. If there is one universe or many, if the universe is eternal or time-bound, if it had a beginning in time or began together with time, we would simply have different ways of expressing a riddle that we would remain powerless to solve.
Insatiability
Our desires are insatiable. We seek from the limited the unlimited. We must fail. Our insatiability is a third incurable defect in human life.
Our insatiability is rooted in our natural constitution. Human desires are indeterminate. They fail to exhibit the targeted and scripted quality of desire among other animals. Even when, as in addiction and obsession, they fix on particular objects, we make those particular objects serve as proxies for longings to which they have a loose or arbitrary relation. We force the limited to serve as a surrogate for the unlimited. This misalliance, revealed most starkly in our obsessional and addictive behavior, carries over to our entire experience of wanting and seeking.
The retreat or vagueness of biological determination in the shaping of our desires opens space for the working of four forces that, together, make our desires insatiable.
A first root of insatiability is the imprinting of the dialectic of embodiment and transcendence on the life of desire. We suffer when desire goes unsatisfied and, when it is satisfied, we are briefly relieved of pain. Our desires, however, are unlimited in both their number and their reach. The moment of dissatisfaction is soon followed by other unrequited wants. Contentment remains a momentary interlude in an experience of privation and longing that has no end.
How could it be different? No narrowly directed set of desires defines our natures. Hence no particular satisfactions can leave us lastingly at ease. The problem with the particular desires and the particular satisfactions is that they are particular and that we, in a sense (the sense of our excess over all the social and conceptual regimes that we engage), are not.
A second root of insatiability is the social construction of desire. Our desires lack a predetermined content. To a large extent, we get the content from one another; our desires represent a kidnapping of the self by society. This commandeering of desire by other people makes the content of desire seem empty, as if it always remained on the periphery of the self, as if it never penetrated the inner and empty core of the personality. We stand forever ready to exchange one invasion of the self by society for another.
A third root of insatiability is the prominence among our desires of those that by their very nature can never be satisfied by most people most of the time. We want from one another acceptance, recognition, and admiration as well as things and power. In particular, we want from one another what every child wants from every parent: an assurance that there is
