10 beyond wishful thinkingCausal succession, rather than being simply a construction of the mind,
is a primitive feature of nature. It sometimes exhibits law- like regularity
(in the relatively settled, cooled- down variations of nature), and some-
times fails to exhibit it.
What there is then at the limit of our understanding is not a universe
that could not be other than it is, or a framework of timeless laws. What
there is is impermanence, which we also call time, and which Anaxi-
mander described some 2,500 years ago at the beginning of both West-
ern science and Western philosophy: “All things originate from one
another, and vanish into one another, according to necessity... under
the dominion of time.” Nothing in this view explains away our specula-
tive groundlessness. On the contrary, everything converges to make its
meaning both more precise and more acute.
Th e world has a history, extending backward and forward in time,
even beyond the present universe. No fi nal system of laws could tell us
what this history was, or will be, or must be; the regularities of the na-
ture are the products of this history even more than they are its source.
When we come to understand this history much better than we now
do, we shall still be confi ned to play a tiny part in it. It remains foreign
to our concerns. Its message continues to be that nothing is for keeps,
and that everything turns into everything else.
What about us? Th at is the question lying at the heart of the problem of
existential groundlessness. A response to our existential groundless-
ness would make sense of our situation in the world in ways that provide
guidance for the conduct of life and for the or ga ni za tion of society. We
may fi rst seek outside ourselves a basis for an orientation to existence in
our general understanding of the world and of our place in it. If such an
understanding yields no clues, we are driven back on ourselves: on our
biographical and historical experience and on our self- understanding.
Th e question then becomes whether the very lack of a grounding out-
side ourselves can be turned into an incitement and a justifi cation for
our self- grounding.
Only if all these attempts fail are we then left face to face with our
existential groundlessness. In every instance, a response to the threat of
existential groundlessness must take account of the most frightening
aspect of our situation: that we will die. If such a response cannot show