overcoming the world 69ting in which everything that we have reason to value is created or
destroyed.
Th e metaphysical extremism of the view that denies the reality of
time, diff erence, and individual selfh ood has always had a practical as
well as a cognitive foundation. Under the disguise of metaphysics, it
has off ered self- help. It has promised a route to happiness even more
forcefully than it has off ered a road to reality. Th is promise has taken
both a minimalist and a maximalist form.
Th e minimalist form of self- help is the hope of becoming invulner-
able, or less vulnerable, to the suff erings that result from our entangle-
ment in the world. By no longer crediting the distinctions and changes
of the world with reality, we also cease to give them value. We diminish
their power over us. Our relation to a world the distinctions of which
we endow with both reality and value is a relationship dominated by
the will. Th e will at odds with a world that it cannot master is the source
of all our suff ering. To escape suff ering we must overcome the will. Th e
best way to overcome the will is to deny its object: the illusory world of
change and distinction. In this minimalist mode, the promise of happi-
ness is a promise of invulnerability, or of diminished vulnerability.
Th e maximalist form of self- help is the hope of establishing contact
with the only true reality and source of value: hidden, unifi ed, and
timeless being. If there are one being and one mind, then our best hope
of happiness lies in overturning the obstacles to our experience of ab-
sorption in that one being and one mind. On such a basis, we can expe-
rience our kinship with all other manifestations of the One, and ex-
press this kinship in an inclusive fellow feeling.
Th e metaphysical vision of the overcoming of the world has more oft en
appeared in a qualifi ed version than it has spoken in the language of
the intransigent view that I have just discussed. Th e hallmark of this
qualifi ed version is the idea of a hierarchy of degrees of reality or of
forms of being. In the West its earliest and most compelling expression
was the middle and late philosophy of Plato: in par tic u lar, Plato’s doc-
trine of forms. It took another expression in the neo- Platonist view of the
phenomenal world as the last stage in a series of emanations of the One.
Consider the qualifi ed version of this metaphysic freed from the dis-
tinctive concerns and categories of Plato’s or Plotinus’s philosophy. Th e