2. Overcoming the World
Central idea, historical presence, and metaphysical vision
Th e vision of the world embraced by this fi rst direction in the religious
history of humanity is one that has always been exceptional in Western
philosophy since the time of the Greeks. However, it has been predomi-
nant in many other civilizations. It is the position to which, outside the
modern West, philosophy and religion have most oft en returned. (Th e
focus on impersonal being at the heart of this view of reality weakens the
distinction between religion and philosophy.)
Th e Indic Vedanta, the Upanishads, early Buddhism, and early Dao-
ism represent the clearest instances of this religious and philosophical
path. In these traditions it has had any number of metaphysical elabo-
rations: for example, Nagarjuna’s doctrine of emptiness (sunyata) in
the context of the Madhyamaka school of Indian Buddhism. It de-
scribes aspects of the doctrines of Parmenides, Plato, the Stoics, and
the neo- Platonists, especially Plotinus. In modern Western thought, the
teaching of Schopenhauer is its consummate expression, both as meta-
physics and as practical philosophy. We can also fi nd it, however, under
diff erent cover, in both the monism of Spinoza and the relationalism of
Leibniz: the decisive common element is denial of the ultimate reality
of time and thus as well of distinctions among the time- drenched and
seemingly mutable phenomena for which we mistake the real.
Th e overcoming of the world resonates in the mystical countercur-
rents of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In Jewish, Christian, and Mus-
lim mysticism, the opening to a personal God risks being sacrifi ced to a