6 beyond wishful thinkingpresupposition leads to another and one cause into another. We never
reach the bottom; the bottom is bottomless.
Th e root experience of groundlessness is astonishment that we exist,
that the world exists, and that the world and our situation in it are the
way they are rather than another way. Th e way they are seems to bear
no relation, other than a relation of indiff erence, to our concerns. In-
deed, on the concern that overrides all others— attachment to life—
nature is not simply indiff erent; it is unforgiving. It has condemned
each of us to destruction.
Th ere is nothing in what we can understand about the workings of
nature, when we do not allow ourselves to be deceived by cowardice, self-
deception, wishful thinking, and power worship, that encourages us in
the pursuit of our loves and devotions, or even provides a basis on
which to understand their place and value in the history and structure
of the universe. Th us, astonishment is accompanied, in the core experi-
ence of groundlessness, by awareness of the incomprehensibility, and of
the sheer alienness, of the world in which we fi nd ourselves.
Consider two distinct aspects of this experience: speculative ground-
lessness and existential groundlessness. It is the latter that counts as
an ineradicable fl aw in the human condition. Its signifi cance, how-
ever, becomes clear only when it is seen against the background of the
former.
Speculative groundlessness goes to the limits of what we can hope to
discover about the universe and about our place in its history. Existen-
tial groundlessness has to do with the limits to our ability to overcome
the disorienting implications of an inescapable fact: we play a part— a
tiny, marginal part— in a story that we did not, and would not, write.
We can edit that story marginally, but we cannot rewrite it. In fact, we
can barely understand it; we survey it only in fragments. Consequently,
our decisions about what to do with our brief lives can have no basis
outside ourselves. We are, in this sense, ungrounded.
Th e most salient feature of the world is that it is what it is rather than
something else. Th e most ambitious projects of understanding of the
world are those that seek to explain why it must be the way it is and
could be no other way and even why something exists rather than noth-
ing. If these endeavors had any merit or prospect of success, our specu-