96 humanizing the worldconception of our duties to one another, has regularly given way to a
quest for individual perfection, or to a search for composure in the
face of suff ering and death, or to a calculus and classifi cation of the
most reliable pleasures. Self- help takes the place of solidarity. Eudai-
monism and perfectionism— the happiness and the improvement of
the individual— become our guides. Other people recede into the dis-
tance; at best they become the benefi ciaries of a superior benevolence,
not the targets of a devotion that we express and sustain through the
fulfi llment of our role- based responsibilities.
Th e intended result becomes ever less the humanization of a mean-
ingful social world as a bulwark against meaningless nature. It be-
comes ever more the rescue of the individual from the injustices of so-
ciety as well as from the suff erings of the body, thanks to a superior
access to fundamental truths. Instead of being reformed and human-
ized, society is dismissed; it is pushed into the background of an exis-
tential ordeal that we must overcome through the marriage of virtue to
philosophical insight. Such was the course of neo- Confucianism, of the
Hellenistic metaphysics of self- help, and of all the many ways in which
the proponents of the idea that human beings create meaning in a
meaningless world wavered in their doctrine.
Making meaning in a meaningless world
Free from the failed attempt to base its response to the defects of the
human condition on the vision of a cosmic order, the humanization of
the world is made out of three building blocks. Each of the three is vital
to its conception and to its program.
Th e fi rst component in this orientation to existence is the link that
it establishes between the meaninglessness of nature and the human
construction of meaning in society. Th e human world must be self-
grounded in a void. It cannot be grounded in anything external to
itself— whether extra- human nature or supra- human reality— that would
guide and encourage us.
We are natural but nevertheless context- transcending beings. Our
embodiment, however, fails to establish our kinship with inhuman na-
ture. We can explore nature around us, extending our powers of per-