ourselves as being in such a world without being of it.
In another description, change will become less dependent on crisis. In society, crisis takes the form of an exogenous shock, such as war or ruin. In thought, it appears as an accumulation of facts that cannot be accommodated within an established theory or discourse. The less a social or conceptual order is designed to open itself up to experimental challenge and revision, the more it will require crisis as the midwife of change. It will break before it bends.
Our stake in bringing about such a change is intimately related to some of our most powerful material and moral interests. It is also associated with the development of our practical capabilities of production through the radicalization of the freedom to recombine people, resources, and machines. It is connected as well to overcoming the forms of social hierarchy and division that hold our relations to one another ransom. Moreover, it is itself, apart from its causal connections with these moral and material interests, the bearer of a spiritual interest: our success in addressing the last of the irremediable flaws in human existence, evoked at the beginning of this book. By transforming, in this way, the character of our relation to the limiting contexts of our existence, we lighten, although we cannot lift, the burden of belittlement: the disproportion between our circumstances and our circumstance-transcending nature.
Progress toward this end takes place in historical time. However, we live in biographical time. What good will it do us if we happen to have been born before this collective work of the ascent of the spirit? Are we condemned to be exiles in worlds of which we are both the builders and the prisoners? We can hope to foreshadow in biographical time what would otherwise be available only in historical time.
We can do so in one way by developing with respect to our character—the rigidified form of a self—an approach analogous to the relation that humanity has reason to develop with regard to the organized forms of society and of thought. We break out of the carapace of compromise and routine in which we gradually cease to live, at the cost of accepting a higher level of vulnerability, and seek so to live that we may die only once.
We can do so in another way by changing, in the light of an iconoclastic attitude to the social and conceptual settings of our existence, our relation to one another. We can then more readily recognize one another as the context-transcending beings that we secretly know ourselves to be, rather than as placeholders in a social and cultural order—an order that not only shapes our life chances but also teaches us how to think and feel and treat one another by virtue of the roles we perform in that order. Thus may a change in our relation to our circumstances become a change in our relation to other people, not automatically or necessarily, but by the joint effort of the imagination and the will.
A thesis of this book is that this vision of the possibilities of human life stands in an especially intimate relation to the third of the three world-historical religious traditions that I here discuss: the one that I call the struggle with the world. Another thesis, however, is that the advance of this vision is largely incompatible with the present forms of the religious and secular beliefs and practices with which that vision has been historically associated; thus the need, and the chance, for a revolution in the religious experience of humanity.
The religion of the overcoming of the world is an adversary of such a revolution, by virtue both of how it asks us to understand our situation and of how it calls us to act. The understanding discourages us from engaging in the successive confrontations with society, culture, and ourselves that are required to advance this undertaking. The call takes us in a direction that is opposite to the one we must pursue to achieve the needed religious revolution. It does so at the very outset of its proposals to the self by teaching the individual to raise a shield against suffering and change when his first task is to cast his shield down.
Nevertheless, the overcoming of the world is not simply a superseded moment in the religious history of humanity. It gives voice to a permanent possibility of religious experience. It will live again in other forms, both as a view of the world and as an imperative of life. Its power results from the directness and simplicity of its response to each of the irremediable flaws in our existence.
It responds to the troubles of mortality by assuring us that, with regard to what matters most, we will not die at all. It teaches us not that the individual self will survive death but rather that, properly considered, such a self never existed at all. Individual selfhood is an epiphenomenal illusion, destined to give way to the revelation of our original and indestructible relation to universal being.
It answers the enigmas of groundlessness by telling us that the explanation of the mystery of being and of life lies before our eyes if only we could free ourselves from the distractions of the phenomena and the illusions of time. Once freed, we shall be able to receive the world in all its splendor; the world will be enough to itself. The effort to apply to all of reality the habits and methods of thought developed to deal with part of it will be exposed as misguided. Our highest science and art will tend to confirm the truth of these metaphysical propositions.
It counters the agonies of insatiable desire by proposing, on the basis of this vision, a series of practices meant to help us escape the ordeal of longing, satiation, and boredom. It promises to free us from the force by which our empty and fickle desires chain us to our peers, whom we allow to fill this void with arbitrary content. To disentangle ourselves from such coils, to recognize the vanity of these pursuits, to steel ourselves against disappointment and disillusionment until we have learned to combine a disillusioned indifference to the world with a disinterested, distant benevolence toward other people—all this forms a path to salvation that will forever exercise its attraction when higher hopes fail.
It responds to the experience of belittlement—the disparity between the circumstances of our lives and the inner reality of our natures—by proposing that we discount the significance and even the reality of the former the better to affirm the latter. It urges us to place value where nothing can corrupt it. The only freedom and greatness worth having are those that circumstance is powerless to diminish.
Such a road to salvation will have adherents so long as there are human beings. The language and the arguments will change, to suit the vocabulary and conditions of the time and place, but the spiritual program will survive. It will continue to tempt those who are disappointed with the reconstruction of society, undertaken in the name of successive revolutionary programs, and skeptical of the transformability of the world. The world such as it appears to us, in its phenomenal diversity and temporal evanescence, does not, they will think, deserve to be changed. It deserves to be overcome. They may seem to go about their business as if time and diversity were for real. They will nevertheless insist that the only reliable way of dealing with the irreparable flaws in human life is to increase our share in an impersonal reality more real and reliable than the individual, mindful organism and than its consciousness of itself as embodied spirit.
3
Humanizing the World
Central idea, historical presence, and metaphysical vision
The natural world—the stage for our tormented passage from birth to death—is indifferent to mankind and largely impenetrable to the mind. It is inhuman and vastly disproportionate to us. Unable to peer into the beginning or the end of time or to measure the outer limits or hidden depths of reality, we remain confined to explaining parts of the world, without ever being able to grasp the relation of the part over which we cast light to the indefinitely larger part that stays unseen. We flatter ourselves in vain that our more or less successful ways of explaining pieces of nature will enable us to explain nature as a whole. The whole remains eternally beyond our reach.
With respect to our greatest good, the good of life, nature works against us. It cheats us of what matters most. It responds to our experience of boundless fecundity, of power to surprise and to overcome, by dooming us to decline and destruction. It is little consolation that life may be denied to the individual only to be granted in spades to the species. We live as individuals, and will not survive to witness the fate of the collective for whose persistence our annihilation is supposed to be indispensable.
The world is meaningless. Its meaninglessness lies in our inability to make sense of its reality and history in terms