Roberto Mangabeira Unger: The Mind at War

In this fourth video in my series on nihilism, I explore in depth the first of the three major spiritual directions I outlined previously: the overcoming of the world. 

The hallmark of the “overcoming of the world” is the belief that under the appearance of distinction and of change, ultimate reality is both unified and timeless. By establishing contact with the one and changeless being, we can achieve a form of selflessness that is, at the same time, an exercise of self-possession.

There have been two main variants of the overcoming of the world considered as a metaphysical view. One variant is radical: it denies altogether the reality of phenomenal distinction and of temporal change. The sole major example in the history of Western philosophy, has been the philosophy of Schopenhauer…

The metaphysic of the overcoming of the world may at first seem incompatible with the teachings of modern science. Yet there is much in the scientific discoveries of the recent past that might inspire a recovery and reinterpretation of this metaphysical conception. No idea has been more central or more revolutionary in the science of the 20th century than the idea that the universe has a history. The natural kinds or distinctions among things that now exist, once did not exist, and at some time int he future will no longer exist. At those times in the past or in the future, the distinction between the laws of nature and the states of affairs that they govern, ceases to hold. On such a view, the distinctions are transient and shallow, but only because time is radically real and permanent. This is a version of the overcoming in the world that seems never to have been expressed in philosophy, East or West…

There are three major objections to this spiritual approach…The third, and the most important, [is] that it promises a state of being that it is unable to deliver. By devaluing the reality of the historical world, and of all the projects we undertake within it, it narrows the scene of our actions and our experience. It drives us back into ourselves. Under the pretense of emancipation, it delivers us to our terrors and to our obsessions. We cannot become free by deciding to be small.