becoming more human by becoming more godlike 395they bring us the good news that we need not fear what we in fact most
fear: our impending dissolution. We need not fear it because it does not
really exist; the victory of death is illusory or temporary.
Th e humanization of the world with its anti- metaphysical metaphys-
ics (as exemplifi ed by the teachings of Confucius or by the contempo-
rary conventional secular humanism) does not deny our mortality and
groundlessness outright. However, it turns decisively away from them
into a world that we can build and control. A wise man, remarked
Spinoza (whose philosophy is otherwise a qualifi ed version of the
overcoming of the world) thinks of life, not of death. In this spirit, the
humanization of the world puts aside the awfulness of death and nihil-
ism the better to focus on its eff ort to inspire a form of life in society
bearing the mark of our concerns. In so doing, however, it bears false
witness to our condition and casts aside an instrument indispensable
to our ascent.
Nor can we look to natural science for a conception that would claim
to probe the ground of existence while continuing to acknowledge the
reality and the inevitability of death. Natural science works in exactly
the opposite direction. Th e advance of our knowledge, even in cosmol-
ogy, brings us no closer to understanding why there is something rather
than nothing or why the universe is what it is rather than something
else. Every discovery of how nature works, or of what course it has taken,
poses the question: why? And every answer to every such question
prompts a further why. Th e inability of natural science to cast light on
the ground of reality and existence does not, however, prevent it from
asking itself not only how death and decline might be delayed but also
even how they might be escaped.
Death and darkness appear early and together in our experience, as
two sides of the same unwanted truth. Each is modifi ed by its combina-
tion with the other. Th e further we refl ect, however, on the relation be-
tween them, the more clearly we see that in its eff ect on the shaping
of our experience, groundlessness is subservient to mortality. Our
groundlessness magnifi es the signifi cance of our mortality but would
lose much of its frightfulness were we deathless.
It is therefore together, and in this unequal combination, that we
face the discovery of death and the enigma of the world and of our