42 beyond wishful thinking
make peace with metaphysics (despite the ancient and yet unfi nished
fl irt with Greek philosophy) because it affi rms the superiority of the
personal over the impersonal, and views the transcendent God and his
dealings with mankind under the aegis of the category of personality.
Where the personal takes priority over the impersonal, and history
over timeless being, the metaphysical repre sen ta tion of reality remains
at a disadvantage. Only a metaphysic of the personal and of the histori-
cal, if it could be formulated, would do.
Nevertheless, both the humanization of the world and the struggle
with the world attempt, within and beyond metaphysics, to provide an
account of our place in the world that not only supplies a guide to life
but also defeats the threat of nihilism. Under the overcoming of the
world, we devalue the superfi cial or illusory experience of individual
selfh ood and phenomenal distinction and make contact with the one
true being. Th is communion supplies the ground that we lacked, even
as it robs death of its sting. Under the humanization of the world, we
secure meaning in human life by informing the practices and arrange-
ments of society with our power to imagine the experience of other
people. Th is imaginative empathy makes possible the integrity of a self-
suffi cing human world in a universe indiff erent to our concerns. Under
the struggle with the world, in either its sacred or secular forms, we en-
ter a path of ascent promising to increase our share in the attributes
that we ascribe to God. Each of these reactions to the threat of nihilism
encounters characteristic diffi culties, as I later show.
In one way or another, these anti- nihilistic messages convey the mes-
sage that everything is fundamentally all right with the world or will be
all right in the end. But for everything to be all right does it suffi ce to
receive reality in the right way, with a correct understanding and attitude,
or must we change the world— and ourselves within it— cumulatively
and in a par tic u lar direction? Is the struggle with nihilism an argu-
ment, such as a metaphysician might have with a skeptic, or is it a cam-
paign of re sis tance, such as a general might wage against an enemy
with vastly superior force?
A third common element of the higher religions resulting from the
religious revolutions of the past is the impulse to affi rm the shallowness
of the diff erences within humanity by contrast to our fundamental
unity: the diff erences of caste, class, race, nation, gender, role, and culture.