“The power of transcendence is vested in the individual human being as well as in the whole of humanity. Our institutions and dogmas have differed in the extent to which they recognize and nourish this power. But even when and where it has been least recognized and most suppressed, it has never been extinguished.
“Death is indescribably awful because it denies us a future, the continuance of experience, and because it denies us, one after another, those whom we love most. That it does so in the context of groundlessness, of the mysterious character of existence, only increases its terrors. We have priceless life, only to have it taken away from us, from ourselves and from our beloved. Although we can account for our mortality in natural-evolutionary terms, we cannot easily resign ourselves to it. If we can transcend, we may be, and have been, tempted to ask: Why can we not outlive?
“The history of religion and philosophy, in the West and throughout the world, is filled with narratives that attempt to explain away the combination of groundlessness and mortality that casts so dark a shadow on our experience. These narratives profess to show us the basis of reality and existence and to offer us a route to eternal life: if not life as we know it, in our bodies and our temporal setting, among those whom we care about most, then life in some more shadowy form—better than nothing, but, even the believer may fear, a sorry substitute for the real thing.
“However, the better the news delivered by these explanations, the greater the reason to suspect that what they deliver is too good to be true. The news becomes more credible as it becomes less encouraging.
“Spinoza, for example, wrote that a wise man thinks of life, not of death. But even the austere Spinoza combined his turning away from death with a denial of groundlessness: he explained to us the ultimate nature of reality and did so in a fashion that makes the cessation of life seem less complete, momentous, and unrequited.
“For the most part, those who see no such answer to death and groundlessness have simply kept their silence and busied themselves with matters that lie more securely within our grasp. Yet a few have thought, with reason, that we need to reckon with groundlessness and mortality the better to resist the routines and the idols that deny us the more complete possession of life.
“The recurrent character of our experience: finitude and transcendence. In the shadow of mortality and groundlessness, we live our lives. The elucidation of our experience and of our powers is the chief concern of philosophy.