Читать книгу The Religion of the Future - Roberto Mangabeira Unger - Страница 8

Central idea, historical presence, and metaphysical vision

The vision of the world embraced by this first direction in the religious history of humanity is one that has always been exceptional in Western philosophy since the time of the Greeks. However, it has been predominant in many other civilizations. It is the position to which, outside the modern West, philosophy and religion have most often returned. (The focus on impersonal being at the heart of this view of reality weakens the distinction between religion and philosophy.)

The Indic Vedanta, the Upanishads, early Buddhism, and early Daoism represent the clearest instances of this religious and philosophical path. In these traditions it has had any number of metaphysical elaborations: for example, Nagarjuna’s doctrine of emptiness (sunyata) in the context of the Madhyamaka school of Indian Buddhism. It describes aspects of the doctrines of Parmenides, Plato, the Stoics, and the neo-Platonists, especially Plotinus. In modern Western thought, the teaching of Schopenhauer is its consummate expression, both as metaphysics and as practical philosophy. We can also find it, however, under different cover, in both the monism of Spinoza and the relationalism of Leibniz: the decisive common element is denial of the ultimate reality of time and thus as well of distinctions among the time-drenched and seemingly mutable phenomena for which we mistake the real.

The overcoming of the world resonates in the mystical countercurrents of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mysticism, the opening to a personal God risks being sacrificed to a vision of impersonal, unified, and universal being. This vision in turn inspires an ethic of selfless benevolence and a quest for indifference to suffering and change. It does so, however, on the basis of a devaluation of the reality of time and of the distinctions among beings, including the distinction among selves. No wonder these mystics have regularly fallen under the suspicion of heresy in each of the Semitic monotheisms.

The metaphysical idea informing this approach to existence is the affirmation of a universal being lying behind the manifest world of time, distinction, and individuality. Our experience is the experience of the reality of time in this one real world. It is an experience of a world in which there is an enduring structure of different kinds of things and the individual mind is embodied in an individual organism. The philosophy and theology of the overcoming of the world tell us, however, that time, distinction, and individuality are unreal, or that they are less real than they seem to be.

In the history of thought, this view has taken both radical and qualified forms. The radical versions of this view (as we have it, for example, in the Vedas or in Schopenhauer) deny time, distinction, and individuality altogether. They proclaim the illusory character of each of these features of our experience. However, even these radical teachings acknowledge that there must be some limited element of truth in these illusory experiences: enough truth to explain why the world appears to us under the disguise of a differentiated structure of distinct types of being.

Unified and timeless being becomes manifest, according to this radical form of the metaphysic of the overcoming of the world, in a manifold of distinct natural kinds: types of being. Some of these types of being possess sentient life and will. They find themselves housed in a particular body, with a particular fate, susceptible to the ills and risks that attend embodiment, and doomed to die. They may be tempted to form an idea of their own distinction and reality that the truth about the world fails to support. In fact, they are passing expressions of what is really real: the one, timeless being that stands behind the screen of time-bound and divided experience.

But why has unitary and timeless being become manifest in divided and time-bound experience? We cannot know. No philosophical statement of this worldview (not even Schopenhauer’s) has ever provided a developed account of why or how underlying being becomes expressed in phenomena that generate such illusions. Why does there exist not just a world but a world that appears—at least to us—under an aspect contradicting its ultimate reality?

Within the bounds of such a view of the world, this question may remain unanswerable. We dare not attribute to unified being the intentions of a person. We are separated from this ultimate reality by the abyss of embodiment and by all the illusions accompanying it. For the metaphysic of the overcoming of the world, our most reliable connection with the one being and the one mind is the experience of consciousness, understood to soar above the divisions that are imposed on this ultimate reality by the incarnation of universal mind in individual bodies. Nothing in the experience of consciousness explains why universal mind should appear to us thus partitioned in the form of individual minds. Nothing in the metaphysical systems associated with the overcoming of the world accounts for why the supposedly illusory experiences of time, distinction, and individual selfhood should form part of the process by which the truth about unified and timeless being is affirmed. The prevalence of these illusions in our experience seems to represent a superfluous and mysterious detour.

This radical version of the metaphysic of the overcoming of the world rests on two bases: one, cognitive; the other, practical. The latter may be stronger and more appealing than the former.

The cognitive basis of this radical metaphysical doctrine is the claim to make sense of a world in which all distinctions are impermanent. The trouble is that impermanence is not the opposite of being or reality. The distinctions among beings in the world may be real, although they are impermanent, if time is real. Then we must form an account of how things turn into other things, in the course of time. To provide such an account is the proper goal of science.

On the other hand, if time is not real, as the radical philosophical statements of the overcoming of the world commonly claim, we can give no account of transformation. Transformation presupposes time. The distinctions among things, or beings, must therefore be illusory. Moreover, the hold of this illusion on our experience must be explained.

The strong point of this radical version of the metaphysics of the reality of the world is its notion of the impermanence of all types of being. Its weak point is its denial of the reality of time. Impermanence with time affirmed means something very different from impermanence with time denied, and has very different implications for the conduct of life and the significance of history. These contrasts come more clearly into focus when we consider them in relation to the discoveries and disputes of contemporary cosmology.¹

There is much in what science has discovered about the universe and its evolution to suggest the impermanence of the structural distinctions that we observe in nature. We are familiar in the life and earth sciences with the principle of the mutability of types: there is, in the history of the earth and of life on earth, no permanent typology of natural kinds, whether the kinds of being are living or lifeless. Every part of this typology is historical; its content changes, albeit discontinuously in time.

The types of being change. So does the character of the ways in which one natural kind differs from another. An igneous rock does not differ from a sedimentary rock in the same way, or in the same sense, that one animal species differs from another.

The mutability of types is in turn connected with a principle of hysteresis or path dependency. The history of mutable types is the concomitant product of many loosely connected sequences of change that cannot persuasively be reduced to one another or inferred from a higher-order explanation: for instance, in Darwinian evolution the relation among the distinct influences of natural selection, of the structural constraints and opportunities created by an established repertory of body types, and of the historical movement and separation of land masses, studied by plate tectonics.

The larger meaning of the principles of path dependency and of the mutability of types becomes clear in the light of a third principle of natural history: the coevolution of the phenomena and of the laws of nature governing them. It is only by sheer dogma, without consequence for the practice of scientific explanation, that we can, for example, suppose that the regularities governing life preexisted its emergence.

We now have reason to believe that these principles, rather than being restricted to the phenomena addressed by the earth and life sciences, apply to the universe as a whole. The most important discovery of the cosmology of the twentieth century is that the universe has a history. The best interpretation of this history is that there was once a time when the rudimentary constituents of nature, as they are now described by particle physics, did not yet exist.

In the very early history of the present universe, nature may not have presented itself as a differentiated structure. There may not have been a clear contrast between states of affairs and laws of nature governing them. Susceptibility to change and the range of the adjacent possible may have been larger than that susceptibility and this range subsequently became in the cooled-down universe studied by the physics that Galileo and Newton inaugurated. It is only thanks to an anachronism, amounting to a cosmological fallacy, that we suppose nature to wear no disguises other than those that it exhibits in the universe as we observe it now, long after its fiery beginnings.

This reasoning may at first suggest that the intransigent form of the metaphysic of the overcoming of the world, rather than being a philosophical fantasy, finds support in the revelations of science. The specific forms of being are evanescent; this metaphysic teaches that it is only being itself that remains. As soon, however, as we introduce into our thinking the idea of the inclusive reality of time, we find that this apparent affinity between the course of modern science and the radical metaphysic of the overcoming of the world starts to vanish.

It is not just the typology of natural kinds that changes in the course of the history of the universe as a whole, as well as in the course of the history of the earth and of life. Change also changes. The ways in which things are transformed into other things are themselves subject to transformation. This susceptibility to uneven and discontinuous change, including to the change of change, is what we call time. If time is not only real but also inclusive, nothing can be beyond its reach, not even the laws, symmetries, and supposed constants of nature. They, too, must have a history and be, in principle, mutable. Their mutability is consistent with the stability that they display in the cooled-down universe, with its well-differentiated and enduring structure.

The prevailing ideas in physics and cosmology take a different direction. They either equivocate about the reality of time or deny it altogether. In rejecting the idea of a fixed background of space and time against which the events of nature take place, they nevertheless reaffirm the notion of an immutable framework of laws, symmetries, or constants of nature.

If time is inclusively real, and everything is subject to its ravages, if it is the only reality that does not emerge, there can be no such unchanging framework. On the other hand, however, if there is such an unchanging framework, there then also exists a basis for a permanent differentiated structure in nature, or a typology of natural kinds, if not in the derivative and emergent phenomena studied by natural history, then in the more fundamental constituents of nature that are explored by physics.

The radical metaphysic of the overcoming of the world affirms the ephemeral character of all distinctions among types of being, at the same time that it denies the reality of time. Its similarity to the scientific view that I have described is therefore merely apparent. In this view all structure is mutable precisely because time is inclusively real. Moreover, the metaphysical conception informing this approach to existence must account for how and why we come to entertain the illusions that it dismisses. In so doing, it cannot appeal to our experience, which is thoroughly penetrated and shaped by those illusions.

By its reliance on this conception, the overcoming of the world arouses the contradiction that I earlier remarked between the theoretical and the practical antidotes to the threat of nihilism. Its theoretical answer to the fear that our lives and the world itself may be meaningless is to cast aside the beliefs, the attachments, and the engagements that prevent us from recognizing our participation in timeless and universal being. By casting them aside, however, it weakens the sole practical antidote to the threat of nihilism, which is life itself, with all its engagements and attachments. On the pretext of increasing our conscious participation in that being, it dissuades us from the complications that give an actual life its fullness. Such invulnerability as we attain risks being achieved through the demoralization and the thinning out of the only kind of experience that we can really undergo.

If time is real, the distinctions among things are historical and therefore transitory, but they are not illusory. They are real so long as they exist. We can understand them only as products of a history of transformation.

The importance of this difference between a view denying the ultimate reality of both distinction and time and a view affirming the inclusive reality of time while insisting on the historical character of transformation becomes clear when we consider its consequences for action in the world. A conception that insists on the illusory character of phenomenal distinction, of individual selfhood, and of time undermines the will from two directions. It does so, first, by attacking the seat of the will in the self. It does so, second, by discounting the reality of the habitual objects of the will. These objects assume the reality and significance of the distinctions and changes that the radical metaphysic of the overcoming of the world denies. If there are ultimately one being and one mind, there is nothing that this one being and one mind can will other than to be themselves.

The overcoming of the world thus becomes, as well, an overcoming of the will: the development of an attitude to the world that is, so far as possible, will-less. We might call this orientation to existence overcoming the will rather than overcoming the world. The dismissal of time, distinction, and individual selfhood and the supersession of the will are thus the two fixed and central points in this metaphysical conception. The campaign against the will in turn serves as a bridge connecting this metaphysical view to the ideals of serenity through invulnerability and of detached, universal benevolence that are characteristic of this approach to life.

By contrast, a view that recognizes the contingent and mutable character of all types of being and affirms the inclusive reality of time assures the will of both a basis and an object. Its basis is the real, individual self. Its object is a world of distinctions that are no less worthy of attention for being ephemeral. For such a view, history is not a shadowy backdrop to our engagement with timeless and unified being. It is the setting in which everything that we have reason to value is created or destroyed.

The metaphysical extremism of the view that denies the reality of time, difference, and individual selfhood has always had a practical as well as a cognitive foundation. Under the disguise of metaphysics, it has offered self-help. It has promised a route to happiness even more forcefully than it has offered a road to reality. This promise has taken both a minimalist and a maximalist form.

The minimalist form of self-help is the hope of becoming invulnerable, or less vulnerable, to the sufferings that result from our entanglement in the world. By no longer crediting the distinctions and changes of the world with reality, we also cease to give them value. We diminish their power over us. Our relation to a world the distinctions of which we endow with both reality and value is a relationship dominated by the will. The will at odds with a world that it cannot master is the source of all our suffering. To escape suffering we must overcome the will. The best way to overcome the will is to deny its object: the illusory world of change and distinction. In this minimalist mode, the promise of happiness is a promise of invulnerability, or of diminished vulnerability.

The maximalist form of self-help is the hope of establishing contact with the only true reality and source of value: hidden, unified, and timeless being. If there are one being and one mind, then our best hope of happiness lies in overturning the obstacles to our experience of absorption in that one being and one mind. On such a basis, we can experience our kinship with all other manifestations of the One, and express this kinship in an inclusive fellow feeling.

The metaphysical vision of the overcoming of the world has more often appeared in a qualified version than it has spoken in the language of the intransigent view that I have just discussed. The hallmark of this qualified version is the idea of a hierarchy of degrees of reality or of forms of being. In the West its earliest and most compelling expression was the middle and late philosophy of Plato: in particular, Plato’s doctrine of forms. It took another expression in the neo-Platonist view of the phenomenal world as the last stage in a series of emanations of the One.

Consider the qualified version of this metaphysic freed from the distinctive concerns and categories of Plato’s or Plotinus’s philosophy. The individual phenomena that we encounter are instances of types of being. These types are in turn formed on the model of invisible archetypes, which may be capable of representation only in the language of mathematics or of a metaphysic eschewing all reference to particulars. What is most present to our experience is less real than what is least present. Our unexamined sense of reality is a delirium brought on by our embodiment and by the consequent limitations of our perceptual apparatus.

Theory can, however, liberate us from the burdens of embodiment and present the world right side up. Once again, however, our practical reasons for adopting such a view will always seem more persuasive than our theoretical reasons. The correct understanding of the hierarchy of being and of reality should allow reason to rule over the action-oriented impulses and these, in turn, to prevail over the carnal appetites. It can equip us to curb our insatiability by overcoming the perspective of the will, entranced with the shadowy world of appearance. It offers to help us achieve serenity in the face of death, which, according to this line of reasoning, annihilates only the lesser reality of ephemeral individual selfhood. It holds open the promise of communion with what is most real and most valuable: the universal being and mind in which we share.

In both the radical and the qualified versions of the metaphysics of the overcoming of the world, the relation between the denial of time and the denial of distinction and individuality plays a central role. The world of individuals and individual things is also the world in which each of these individuals remains subject to the ravages of time. It is a world in which our engagements and connections function as the most important clocks by which we measure the passage of our lives.

Time and distinction are internally related in experience. If different parts of the world, or states of affairs, did not change differently, there would be no time. The reality of time presupposes a world made up of distinct elements that fail to change in lockstep.

On the other hand, if time did not exist, there could no causal interaction among parts of the world. There could be only a timeless grid or manifold (as represented, for example, by the philosophy of Leibniz). Different kinds of being might continue to be distinguished from one another in such a world, as nodes in a grid. Nevertheless, the sense in which things are distinct from one another and identical to themselves would be very different from what it is in the world that we actually inhabit. Their natures would be hidden, at least to us.

We understand a state of affairs by grasping what it can become in a range of circumstances: the understanding of the actual is inseparable from the imagination of the possible—of the adjacent possible, of what can next happen or of what we can make happen next. So if there were no time, we would be unable to understand the grid by appreciating how its different parts work. In a sense, all we could do is stare at it, not even to see it, if seeing connotes a measure of understanding.

The intimate relation between time and distinction is further shown by our ability to put both of them aside in our mathematical and logical reasoning. Such reasoning takes place in time (if indeed time is real). We can use our mathematical and logical discoveries or inventions to represent time-bound events. Newton and Leibniz developed the calculus, for example, for just that purpose.

Nevertheless, the relation among logical and mathematical propositions is not itself time bound. A conclusion is simultaneous with its premise, but an effect must come after its cause. In mathematics and logic we explore a simulacrum of the world, from which time and phenomenal difference (the distinctions among kinds of being) have been sucked out. We consider the world under the aspect of bundles of relations, unrelated to the time-bound particulars that we experience.

We can readily recognize the evolutionary advantages that such a power affords us: thanks to its exercise, we vastly expand our repertory of ways of understanding and of representing how parts of the world can interact with another. We do so, however, at the cost of letting into the inner citadel of the mind a Trojan Horse built against the recognition of distinction and time.

No wonder the qualified versions of the metaphysic of the overcoming of the world—the versions that represent the phenomena as less real than their hidden archetypes—have so often been expressed in the language of mathematics. There is a sense in which our mathematical and logical reasoning gives us a foretaste of the overcoming of the world. The adherents to the overcoming of the world treat this foretaste as a revelation of the nature of ultimate reality. We who resist both this metaphysics and the moral project it helps inspire may prefer to understand mathematics and logic as inquiries into a simplified proxy for the one real world, a proxy reduced to the most general features of reality and therefore robbed of individual difference and of time.

Incitements to overcoming the world

The direction in the religious experience of humanity that I am calling the overcoming of the world is, like the other two directions to which I next turn, more than a long moment in the religious history of mankind. Viewed as a mode of consciousness rather than as systematic doctrine, it is not confined to particular philosophical or theological traditions. It presents itself under different disguises as a way of thinking and of feeling that will forever be persuasive. Two forces, each deeply rooted in our experience, perennially renew its life.

The first force is our experience of mind and of access to other minds. Viewed from a certain perspective, all that we ever have direct access to is a mental state now, in the augmented present allowing for an experience of the passage of what has been to what is beginning to be. Our past and future mind states, which we are accustomed to regard as expressions of our embodied and continuous selves, are fabrications or representations of the mind caught in that augmented present.

In each such moment, our view of what came before and of what is to come later changes. Whether our past and future mind states deserve to be regarded as the mental experience of the same self, like the photographs that make up a moving film, is a conventional belief that may be supported by a wide range of theoretical justifications. It is not an immediate and indubitable experience.

On the other hand, despite the hiddenness of other people, of their fears and longings, impressions and perceptions, we regularly feel that we do have some access to other minds: to the present mind states of those around us and to the past mind states that are recorded or remembered. All our spoken or silent dealings with them presuppose such an access. All our conduct is a perpetual testing of the rightness of our conjectures about them.

No nation is so distant in historical time or in cultural remoteness that we cannot hope to penetrate something of its sensibility and consciousness. Our ability to imagine alien experience finds nourishment in an understanding of ourselves, enlarged by an education that gives us access to the subjective life of humanity in times and places distant from our own. If the unity and the continuity of our own mental experience are in doubt, so may the otherness of the mental experience of other people seem to be only relative.

The baffling character of our relation to our own as well to other people’s conscious life has suggested to many, in the course of the history of thought and of feeling, that there is only one mind or that mind is one. The unity of mind would be the true basis for our power to imagine the alien. It would be the material that appears to us broken up in the present moment—the simultaneous dying away of what has just been and coming to be of what is to become—that is the only experience we ever have in the world. It is distributed in different mind states only as light is refracted in rays. It is nevertheless always the same thing, like light itself.

This unified being or mind is the ultimate reality; everything else is either unreal or less real. Its site of revelation is the present, the now; the past and future are mental constructions rather than mental experiences. The exigencies of our embodiment are what lead us to them. Once we begin to doubt the reliability of those constructions, we begin to doubt as well that time is what we habitually take it to be. We start to take as the cornerstone of our view of the world the present mindedness that is not only the most reliable form of experience but, strictly speaking, the sole form.

The second force inspiring the effort to overcome the world is a paradoxical feature of our experience. We must face the ineradicable defects in our circumstance: the terror of death, the vertigo of groundlessness, and the treadmill of desire and frustration, aggravated by our susceptibility to the insult of belittlement. Of these defects, we many succeed temporarily in suppressing our awareness of the first two and of resigning ourselves to the fourth by lowering our expectations of life. From the third, however—the relative emptiness of our desires, our tendency to fill them up under the pressure of the ideas of and behaviors of those surrounding us, our struggle to demand the unlimited from the limited, the relentless move from privation to frustration or satiation and in either event to disappointment and boredom—from this ordeal we can never escape.

On the other hand, the world seduces us at every turn. The possession of life is the gateway through which we move toward its irresistible glories. The radiance of being, of its unity and diversity, threatens to dazzle, blind, and paralyze us if we fail to turn away from it to the business at hand.

The doctrinal expressions of the overcoming of the world offer an account of the sources and meaning of this contradictory character of our experience. The sensibility and consciousness expressed and enhanced by these doctrines promise relief from this rift within us. They propose to show how we can see and live in such a way that the charms of the world may prevail over the flaws in existence. The quest for invulnerability to change and suffering, as well as for benevolence given from on high, provides a practical route by which to achieve this goal.

It is thus a mistaken prejudice to associate the overcoming of the world with a philosophical pessimism, as it is associated in the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the sole thoroughgoing development of this point of view that we have had in the West. Like the other two major orientations in the history of world religion, the overcoming of the world connects insight with hope and salvation. The question to ask next is whether it looks for salvation and hope in the right place.

Serenity and benevolence

These ideas and incitements inspire a vision of how to live. In that vision, the two central commitments are to serenity and benevolence. They are closely linked.

We achieve serenity by conquering the will, which, seated in the embodied self, seeks the attractions and prizes of a realm of shadows. We cultivate an inner reserve from the commotions of this shadowy domain, a reserve founded upon our acknowledgment of the truth—of the One being or of the archetypes of reality—lying behind the veil of time, distinction, and individual selfhood. We discount the significance of the ups and downs of worldly fortune. We become, to that extent, invulnerable; invulnerability and serenity represent two aspects of this same ideal of existence. We experience, right now, our share in the hidden reality of the One or in the hidden realities of the models of being.

The right understanding of the world may be a necessary condition of our detachment. However, it is generally recognized by the votaries and philosophers of the overcoming of the world to be an insufficient condition. Right understanding must be supplemented by disciplines that, under the light of this understanding, turn the will against itself. One such discipline is that of intense concentration, filtering out all extraneous elements in consciousness, and turning consciousness on itself, until it comes to experience itself as a piece or as an expression of universal mind. Another discipline is the cultivation, through art and speculative thought, of a contemplative view of reality, uncontaminated and undistracted by the interests of the embodied and individual will. Yet a third discipline is sacrificial action, which not only acknowledges our universal kinship with all other beings but also practices renunciation of our self-regarding and partial interests.

The intended effect of these disciplines is not to prevent us from acting. It is to allow us to act as the conscious citizens of a higher order of reality. The serenity that it seeks is therefore compatible with courageous and even heroic intervention in society. The risks and costs of such intervention, rather than placing the ideal of serenity in jeopardy, reveal its nature. Serenity results from self-possession. The self that is thus possessed, however, is not the one that awakens to find itself tied to a dying organism. It is the one that recognizes its participation in an order of reality and of value lying beyond the parade of phenomenal difference and change. We can more readily confront or renounce the epiphenomenal because we have come to view our experience in the light of the real, which is also the timeless.

A disinterested and universal benevolence forms, alongside this ideal of serenity and self-possession, the second part of the existential imperative that results from the overcoming of the world and of the will. It is the specific form taken, in this approach to life, by the inclusive fellow feeling that all the higher and historical religions sought to put in the place of an ethic of proud self-assertion.

Its distinctive tone is sacrificial attentiveness to the needs of others, marked by distance and detachment. Such benevolence is highest and purest when uncompromised by any erotic interest or by any proximity of blood, community, or common interest. It is best experienced and offered by a person who has already triumphed over the illusions of the will. Although it may be attended by great costs and risks, including death, it brings no inner trouble. It cannot be troubled by being rebuffed. On the contrary, it is marked by a joy signaling our discovery that we are not simply the individuated selves, the partial minds, and the dying organisms that we appear to be. It is both enabled by serenity and productive of serenity.

A benevolence of this nature presupposes no equality between the lover (if we can call disinterested benevolence love) and the beloved. For one thing, different human beings achieve different degrees of advance in the overcoming of the world and of the will. Only those who advance furthest toward this goal are capable of the greatest generosity. For another thing, the lover needs nothing from the beloved, not even disinterested love in return. The less his benevolence is requited, the more perfect it is.

The metaphysical basis of this ideal of benevolence is the same as the metaphysical foundation of the ideal of serenity. It is the acknowledgement of the falsehood or shallowness of all the divisions within the cosmos as well as within mankind. The overcoming of the world infers the denial or devaluation of the barriers within humanity—a shared theme of the religions of transcendence—from its most general thesis about the ultimately real. The practical consequence for the ideal of benevolence is that our sacrificial good will should reach out not just to other human beings and to non-human sentient creatures but even, as well, to all beings, caught in the toils of illusory distinction and change.

From the combination of the radical or qualified metaphysic of the overcoming of the world with the twofold imperative of serenity and benevolence, there results a response to death, groundlessness, insatiability, and belittlement.

The overcomers of the world and of the will deny death by affirming that the life of the individual self was, to begin with, an illusory or derivative phenomenon. In the radical versions of the metaphysic of overcoming, the dissolution of the body breaks down the barrier that sustained the illusion of our estrangement from one and timeless being. In the qualified versions, with their hierarchy of degrees of being and reality, death represents an incident in an itinerary (for example, of the transmigration of the soul, to be embodied in other individual organisms) that has our reunion with one and timeless being as its goal.

The overcomers deny groundlessness by moving toward what they regard to be the ground of existence, concealed from us by the phantasms of our mendacious experience of time, distinction, and individual selfhood. Communion with that ground is the ultimate source of both insight and happiness. It is the sole trustworthy guarantee of the serenity that we should seek and of the benevolence that we should practice.

The overcomers deny insatiability by professing to teach us the only way in which we can free ourselves from insatiable desire: to turn aside from the source of desire in the unquiet and embodied self. By negating both the seat and the target of desire and by dismissing or devaluing the impermanent, we escape the ordeal of insatiability. Our escape begins in the right understanding of the world and in the pursuit, on the basis of such understanding, of the ideals of serenity and of benevolence.

The overcomers deny the inescapability of belittlement by affirming our connection to the source of all reality and value: one and timeless being, concealed under the disguise of transient and misleading phenomena. The phenomena separating us from the real and the valuable can also, if we understand them correctly and act according to this insight, become the bridge to the hidden truth of our being. By crossing this bridge, we can experience divinity now.

Criticism: betrayal of the past

My criticism of the overcoming of the world moves from a point of view internal to this way of thinking and acting to a perspective external to it. I first ask whether this direction in the religious consciousness of humanity has enabled its adepts to do justice to the concerns shared by the religious revolutions of the past. Next, I discuss the psychological stability of this set of enacted beliefs: its chances of success in adapting its program to what we are like and can turn ourselves into. Finally, I take up the aspirations to which this form of consciousness is almost entirely blind, and pass judgment on it from the anticipated standpoint of the religion of the future.

The forms of belief and of conduct characteristic of this religious orientation respond to the common and fundamental concerns of the past religious revolutions: most notably, the tearing down of the barriers within humanity and the supersession of the ethic of the strong and of their lordship over the weak. However, although they address these aims and hold out the tantalizing prospect of satisfying them, they cannot in fact achieve them. The fundamental reason for this inadequacy is simple: we cannot change the world or ourselves by standing and waiting. We can do so only by acting.

The overcoming of the world is not closed to a horizon of action; it has regularly served as the basis for an ethic of inclusive fellow feeling and compassionate initiative. However, it cannot inspire and inform a sustained program of transformation of the social order without being false to its central message. It must treat history as a nightmare from which we seek to awake rather than as the stage of our salvation.

The denial or demotion of the reality of the historical world has as its practical consequence an accommodation to the social order that exists within this world. A priestly or philosophical class performs in this order a high but limited role. It connects the this-worldly reality of the established arrangements to what is supposed to be a realm of higher value and reality. The practices of the Indo-European peoples assign a place to the priests and philosophers alongside, not against, the rulers and warriors. Some versions of these beliefs in Hinayana and especially in lamaist Buddhism have been frankly theocratic, demanding to turn spiritual authority into worldly power, but only the better to subordinate the supposedly shadowy realm of historical experience to a source of truth beyond time. They have never had cause to view the reconstruction of society as the place where the work of salvation must begin.

The occasional exercise of theocratic power in this tradition has confirmed rather than contradicted the claim that it lacks, by virtue of its central message, any program for the reform of social life, other than the subordination of economic activity to the incantatory foreshadowing and embodiment of the higher, hidden reality. No step-by-step remaking of earthly reality could prepare society, under such a dispensation, for the reign of spirit other than an incessant reverence, expressed through prayer. Such a reverence supposedly signals the surrender of the epiphenomenal world to the real one.

It is true that Plato envisaged the government of society by philosophers informed by a metaphysic representing the phenomenal and historical realms as shadows of the archetypes of true being. However, this government ruled only in a book, never in the reality of power. Nothing in the book explained how or why such a power reversal would take place. What remains, instead, is a thought experiment, an exercise in wishful thinking, designed to jump over the abyss between the admonitory parables of the philosophical dreamers and the harsh realities of an unchanged world.

Just as the religion of the overcoming of the world is unable to support in fact the destruction of barriers within humanity, because its quietism reduces the this-worldly significance of its message, so too, for the same reason, it is incapable of supplying an effective substitute for the lordly ethic of honor and dominion. The otherworldliness of the priests ends in the de facto acceptance of a division of labor between the world renouncers and the world rulers. To Caesar what is Caesar’s: almost everything. To the other world, a testimonial, within this world, that ordinarily threatens no this-worldly interest but lives alongside it in submissive or anxious retreat.

If, however, the focus of the ethic that is to take the place of lordship and honor shifts from reverence and renunciation to generosity and fellow feeling, even if offered from on high, without the perils of personal love, grounds for a struggle with the world begin to emerge. (They emerged most notably in the evolution of Mahayana Buddhism, in the devotional or bakhti forms of Hinduism, and in the mystical countercurrents within the Semitic monotheisms, which brought them closer to the religion of the overcoming of the world.) Then the moral basis for a division of labor between the ruler-warriors and the priests-philosophers starts to crumble, and a vision capable of speaking to all humanity takes form.

The trouble is that the effort to enact this vision through a reshaping of social relations inspired by the ideal of a world-embracing sympathy is pushed in contradictory directions by the view of ultimate reality that informs it. This view affirms the deep unity of suffering humanity and indeed of all living creatures. In contesting the firm boundaries of the self, it provides a basis for benevolent action in universal selfhood. However, in denying or diminishing the significance of what goes on in both the historical time of societies and the biographical time of individuals, it undermines the reasons, and obscures the guideposts, for transformative action. It takes humanity to the threshold of struggle with the world and leaves men and women there, with an emotion but without a program.

Criticism: the school of experience

Having addressed the overcoming of the world by the light of the shared goals of the religious revolutions that resulted in the major orientations to existence discussed here, consider now this approach to existence by the standard of its psychological reality and stability: its connection with our most deep-seated dispositions. Viewed from this perspective, its flaw is its war against life, life as it really is, manifest in the living individual and the mortal organism.

The denial of the reality of the individual self is a denial of death. It is also an anticipation of death, as if we could rob death of its terrors by foreshadowing right now the dissolution of the self into universal mind. Death is denied by a series of connected, self-fulfilling prophecies that are to free us from the cares and distractions of mortality and to put us in communion with a reality that the decay of our mortal bodies cannot corrupt.

Life, however, fights back. We cannot protect ourselves in this way against death without diminishing or devaluing our dealings with the world and with the people around us, which is to say, without suppressing life. It is as if the way to redress the irremediable flaws in our existence were to have less existence. We transport ourselves out of the coils of our alienated existence into a universal experience, without the dangerous boundaries, of embodiment and time, in which we seem to find ourselves encased.

In the realm of practical action, the consequence at the limit is a progressive disengagement. If our struggle to be free of the subjugating and depersonalizing perils of intimate connection remains at odds with our recognition of the need to affirm and to develop ourselves through connection, then the solution to this contradiction in the requirements of personal existence is to lengthen our distance from both sides of this polarity. We shall still be able to recognize our kinship with our fellow creatures, but we shall do so from a distance, the distance of a benevolence offered from a superior position, with the double privilege of higher place and limited exposure, without danger of rebuff or disappointment. We shall give up the attempt to form connections that diminish the conflict between the value and the danger of attachment to others. We shall not see in personal love among equals, and in the social arrangements that spread its influence to broader parts of our experience, the supreme instance of such a reconciliation.

Our need to engage in a particular society and culture for the sake of self-construction and of fidelity to our beliefs threatens to result in our surrender to the ideas and standards of other people. Our refusal to surrender drives us into an isolation that denies us means for productive action in the world. The solution that the overcoming of the world proposes to this second contradiction among the requirements of a strong self in society is to withdraw into an inner citadel.

Under the terms of this solution, we renounce the effort permanently to change the relation between spirit-limiting structure and structure-defying spirit by creating societies and cultures that enable us to engage more and to surrender less. We lose hope in the possibility of developing institutions and practices that weaken the contrast between the ordinary moves we make within a framework of established arrangements and assumptions and the extraordinary moves by which we change that framework. Instead, we place our hope in another realm of value and reality, one in which worldly power counts for little. Of the social order in which we have refused to place our hope, we demand chiefly that it not bar our access to higher reality and value and not inflict unnecessary cruelty on our fellow sufferers, who await with us their liberation from the perceived circumstance of an embodied self, exposed to suffering and death.

Life is the cumulative sum of our engagements and connections. The more we shield ourselves against change and illusion, the less we shall have to shield. The spell that we cast on ourselves to ensure serenity through indifference will sometimes work. However, it will work only at the cost of dimming vitality. It deals with death by anticipating it in contained and reassuring form.

Sometimes the spell will fail to work. Life embodied within us, in the individual self and the dying organism, not in universal and deathless mind, reasserts itself. We experience boredom: the weight of unused capacity, the intimation of undeveloped life. We find the spell degenerating into crankiness, under the principle of addiction: the fixation on particular formulas or routines from which, in vain, we try to win a definitive serenity. Such is the futile attempt that shadows all existence but appears here, in concentrated form, as an effort to make the limited yield the unlimited.

The followers of the overcoming of the world will deny that they wage a war against life. They will claim, in accordance with their vision, that their road to salvation enables us to get off the treadmill of insatiable and frustrated desire and allows us to live in the present, open to the world and to the people around us. If each moment and each experience are to be valued as steps to what could or should succeed them, then we shall never live for now. We shall postpone the fuller possession of life. Our anxious striving will make us less receptive to the people as well as the phenomena within reach. We shall have denied ourselves the self-possession that is the condition for the enhancement of vitality.

However, we cannot be fully alive without engaging the world. We cannot engage it without struggling with it, in imagination as well as in practice. We cannot wage this struggle with conviction unless we have reason to take our phenomenal and historical experience seriously rather than to discount the reality of its sources and objects.

The overcoming of the world conflicts with these requirements at two decisive points. It conflicts with them, first, in its vision: the denial of the ultimate reality of time and therefore of history as well as of phenomenal and individual distinction. It contradicts them, second, in its proposal for how we should live our lives by urging on us a search for serenity through invulnerability. Such a search turns us away from the engagements required for the enhancement of life. It promises serenity, but delivers a foretaste of death.

The need for transformative engagement with the world as a requirement of vitality is not confined to practical activity. It already arises in the work of the imagination. That work relies on two recurrent moves. The first move—the only one acknowledged by Kant—is distancing. The phenomenon must be evoked in its absence; an image is the memory of a perception. The second move is transformation; to understand a phenomenon or a state of affairs is to grasp what it can become under certain conditions or by virtue of particular interventions. Insight into what can happen next is internally related to insight into the existent; the latter deepens in proportion to the advance of the former.

In all these respects, the imagination accompanies and outreaches our practical activities. In its evolutionary setting it serves the purposes of a mindful organism that must solve problems in particular circumstances, equipped with a limited perceptual apparatus, and contend with uncertainty, contingency, and constraint. Thus, in its origins and evolutionary uses, it already stands in the service of life and of power.

However, the imagination soon goes beyond its immediate service to practical problem solving. It develops our understanding of what is in the light of our insight into what may come to be. Its focus is less the phantasmagorical horizon of ultimate possibilities, which we are powerless to discern, than the content of the proximate possible: of what can happen, or we can make happen. The commanding principle of the imagination is its affinity to action, grounded in their shared element: enacted or anticipated change. Openness to transformation, in biographical and historical time and in a world in which the differences among phenomena are both real and subject to change, is part of what we mean by life.

The religion of the overcoming of the world is hostile, both as a vision and as a project, to the enhancement of life. In tempting us to don a coat of armor against the sufferings induced by our mortality, our groundlessness, our insatiability, and our difficulty in living as beings who transcend their contexts, it cannot in fact make us more receptive to the people and to the phenomena surrounding us. It cannot do so because it denies us the means and the occasions by which to imagine them. It fails to strengthen the sentiment of life within us because it prefers serenity to vitality.

Criticism: betrayal of the future

The religion of the overcoming of the world was never capable of carrying out the shared element in the program of past religious revolution. Moreover, it could never be reconciled to the tenacious dispositions and aspirations of humanity except through a deliberate dimming of consciousness and vitality, undertaken in the futile quest to achieve serenity through invulnerability. Similarly, it cannot serve as a starting point for a future revolution in the religious affairs of mankind that is animated by the aim of lifting humanity up, of enhancing its powers, of intensifying its experience, of giving it a wider share in the attributes of divinity, of acting on the principle that we can become better servants of one another if we become greater masters of the structures of society and of thought to which we habitually surrender our humanity.

At the heart of the program of this future religious revolution lies a problem that is squarely presented by the third of the three world-historical religious orientations—the struggle with the world—but that is as foreign to the overcoming of the world as it is to the humanization of the world. In posing this problem, I can rightly be accused of judging one of these traditions by the standards of another. And so I do. I profess no neutrality among them. I claim for one of them an authority that the other two have never gained, and can never hope to gain, in the eyes of humankind: the authority that results from having helped inform and inspire the revolutionary projects that have shaken the world in the last two centuries. These projects fall into two main types: the secular programs of emancipation (democracy, liberalism, and socialism) and the worldwide popular romantic culture.

I later return to the question of the sense in which we have reason to defend and to reinvent these projects. What, however, not even their enemies will be able to deny is that these twin revolutionary messages have exerted an influence in the recent history of mankind unparalleled in its reach. This message derives its power from its promise to elevate human life for the many right now and to continue doing so in the future. In their discourse, common humanity has identified an offer—of recognition as well as empowerment—that it cannot refuse.

A major part of this offer turns on the prospect of enhancing and transforming, by the way in which we connect them, two varieties of individual and collective self-assertion. One variety regards our relations to our fellow human beings. The other variety refers to our relation to the organized institutional and conceptual settings of our life and thought.

There is a problem about our relation—practical, emotional, and cognitive—to other people: we both need them and fear them. It is only through encounter and connection that we develop and sustain an individual self. Nevertheless, every social attachment threatens to entangle us in a structure of dependence and domination and to make the individual self bend to the demands of a collective stereotype. To be freer and bigger would be to see the conflict between the enabling requirements of self-assertion attenuated: more connection, achieved at less of a price in dependence and depersonalization.

There is, as well, a problem about our relation to the institutional and conceptual settings of our action: the institutional organization of society and the discursive organization of thought forming the collective backdrop to individual existence. To act, we must engage these social and conceptual regimes on their own terms. It is only through such engagement that we develop and sustain individual personality; without it, we remain empty. However, every such engagement threatens to become a surrender. We risk giving up to the institutional and conceptual regimes under which we live the powers that we should properly and ultimately reserve to ourselves. To be freer and bigger would be to be able to share in these contexts without surrendering to them our powers of resistance and reconstruction.

The point is not just to challenge and change the social and conceptual frameworks in which we habitually move; it is to change our relation to them. Here are two equivalent ways of describing the change that is to be desired.

In one description, the distance between the ordinary moves that we make within a framework, leaving it undisturbed and even unseen, and the extraordinary moves, by which we bring pieces of the framework into question, will diminish. Our social arrangements and discursive practices will provide instruments and opportunities for their revision. Society and thought will be so arranged that we can be better equipped and provoked to reconsider and to revise the order as we go about our daily business within it. As a result, we shall be able to say to a greater extent that we can both engage particular social and conceptual regimes and go beyond them. In the old theological language, we can describe 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.