3. Humanizing the World
Central idea, historical presence, and metaphysical vision
Th e natural world— the stage for our tormented passage from birth to
death— is indiff erent 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 mea sure the outer limits or hidden
depths of reality, we remain confi ned to explaining parts of the world,
without ever being able to grasp the relation of the part over which we
cast light to the indefi nitely larger part that stays unseen. We fl atter
ourselves in vain that our more or less successful ways of explaining
pieces of nature will enable us to explain nature as a whole. Th e 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 experi-
ence 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 spe-
cies. We live as individuals, and will not survive to witness the fate of
the collective for whose per sis tence our annihilation is supposed to be
indispensable.
Th e world is meaningless. Its meaninglessness lies in our inability to
make sense of its reality and history in terms pertinent to human con-
cerns: our commitments, attachments, and engagements. If the world
is meaningless, so, until further initiative, is our place within it. Will
this larger meaninglessness— the groundlessness and aimlessness of