14 beyond wishful thinkingof the world. Who would accept such a trade if he could avoid it? It is in
this regard that the news is disheartening.
Th e disadvantages of the exchange are aggravated by the practical
consequences of following the road marked out by the approach to re-
ality informing it. Despite the basis that it off ers for the assertion of an
encompassing kinship with other people, and indeed with the whole of
reality, and notwithstanding the call to compassionate action that it
may inspire, its fundamental proposal is that we put the phenomenal
and temporal world in its place. We are to discount its authority and
reality, the better to achieve communion with the one being.
By conforming to this recommendation, we place the theoretical
antidote to the experience of groundlessness at odds with the most reli-
able practical antidote that we have. For if the sense of the dream- like
character of existence has any eff ective remedy, the cure lies in our en-
gagements and attachments rather than in self- help through metaphys-
ics. Nothing can better reconcile us to life than more life. It forms part
of the peculiar character of this approach to the world, however, to cast
doubt on the (ultimate) reality and authority of the phenomenal and
temporal world, the world of history and of distinct human agents, in
which such engagements and attachments fl ourish.
A third approach to our existential groundlessness, illustrated by the
teachings of Confucius (as well as by many strands in Western secular
humanism), begins from a wholly diff erent point of departure. It ac-
cepts our speculative groundlessness but refuses to see it as implying
our existential groundlessness. It proposes that we ground ourselves by
building a culture and a society bearing the mark of our concerns and
fostering our better selves.
Th e great spectacle of nature is, according to this view, meaningless.
We can hope to master a small part of it and to make it serve our inter-
ests. We cannot, however, bridge the chasm between the vast indiff er-
ence of the cosmos and the requirements of humanity. All that we can
do is to create a meaningful order within an otherwise meaningless
cosmos.
Our best chance of establishing such an order is to refi ne who we are
and how we deal with one another. We can do so through a dialectic
between the rules, roles, and rituals of society and the gradual strength-
ening of our powers of imaginative empathy: our ability to understand