76 overcoming the worldIts distinctive tone is sacrifi cial attentiveness to the needs of others,
marked by distance and detachment. Such benevolence is highest and
purest when uncompromised by any erotic interest or by any proximity
of blood, community, or common interest. It is best experienced and
off ered by a person who has already triumphed over the illusions of the
will. Although it may be attended by great costs and risks, including
death, it brings no inner trouble. It cannot be troubled by being re-
buff ed. On the contrary, it is marked by a joy signaling our discovery
that we are not simply the individuated selves, the partial minds, and
the dying organisms that we appear to be. It is both enabled by serenity
and productive of serenity.
A benevolence of this nature presupposes no equality between the
lover (if we can call disinterested benevolence love) and the beloved.
For one thing, diff erent human beings achieve diff erent degrees of ad-
vance in the overcoming of the world and of the will. Only those who
advance furthest toward this goal are capable of the greatest generosity.
For another thing, the lover needs nothing from the beloved, not even
disinterested love in return. Th e less his benevolence is requited, the
more perfect it is.
Th e metaphysical basis of this ideal of benevolence is the same as the
metaphysical foundation of the ideal of serenity. It is the acknowledge-
ment of the falsehood or shallowness of all the divisions within the
cosmos as well as within mankind. Th e overcoming of the world infers
the denial or devaluation of the barriers within humanity— a shared
theme of the religions of transcendence— from its most general thesis
about the ultimately real. Th e practical consequence for the ideal of
benevolence is that our sacrifi cial good will should reach out not just to
other human beings and to non- human sentient creatures but even, as
well, to all beings, caught in the toils of illusory distinction and change.
From the combination of the radical or qualifi ed metaphysic of the
overcoming of the world with the twofold imperative of serenity and
benevolence, there results a response to death, groundlessness, insatia-
bility, and belittlement.
Th e overcomers of the world and of the will deny death by affi rming
that the life of the individual self was, to begin with, an illusory or deriva-
tive phenomenon. In the radical versions of the metaphysic of overcom-
ing, the dissolution of the body breaks down the barrier that sustained