"All Things Shining" is a book written by two philosophers, for a general audience. While there is textual analysis and criticism, it is in service of a goal that the authors feel should have very broad appeal in our secular and nihilistic age:
"The world used to be in its various forms, a world of sacred, shining things. The shining things now seem far away. This book is intended to bring them close once more. [. . .] Anyone who wants to lure back the shining things, to uncover the wonder we were once capable of experiencing, and to reveal a world that sometimes calls forth such a mood; anyone who is done with indecision and waiting, with expressionlessness and lostness and sadnes and angst, and who is ready for whatever it is that comes next; anyone with hope instead of despair, or anyone with despair that they would like to leave behind, can find something worthwhile in the pages ahead. Or at least that is what we intend.
The authors goal, in short, is to clear a path by which people can lure back the "merry May-day gods of old"--the sacred shining things--in order that they may thereby lead intense and meaningful lives, as the ancient Greeks once did. However, they are not interested in trying to recover anything supernatural; they are not, for example, interested in bringing back belief in a literally existing, supernatural Greek Goddess named "Aphrodite". They are instead interested in something that might be called a mood, or an attunement, that opens one to the world, and to a sacred dimension that once may have been understood as, and represented by a god or goddess: the erotic dimension and that which attunes one to it, being that which was once called "Aphrodite"; the aggressive, war-like dimension "Ares"; and so on.
The authors look back to Homer's polytheism (among other worlds) and the inner attitudes that it engendered because they believe that people now have a "gut-level sadness" and lead flattened down and meaningless lives. Our age is one that is threatened by nihilism. Indeed, our very lives are threatened:
"The stakes are even higher. The Enlightenment's metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life. It leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one."
And the more sensitive ones among us--like canaries in a coal mine--have already born witness to the great danger of nihilism. Chapter 1 and 2 of the book are called, respectively, "Our Contemporary Nihilism" and "David Foster Wallace's Nihilism." David Foster Wallace (who battled with depression all his life and who finally took his own life) was very interested in finding out what was still alive and viable in our age so that he could "apply CPR" to it. He viewed this as the mission of an author--or at least as his mission. His tried to overcome the problem of despair and the wasteland of a "consumer hell" by offering the possibility that we can attribute meanings to things by force of intellectual will. You can chose how you will take things, he says. The lady in front of you yelling at her kid in the checkout line might have been up all night holding the hand of her husband who is undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer, for example. She might have. You can't say for sure she wasn't. The mind is its own place, and can make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell, in other words. Wallace, however, failed to achieve this, and felt that he wouldn't ever achieve it. The authors point out that that is because such a thing is impossible. You can't just attribute any arbitrary meanings to things ex nihilo, like God, because you are a human, not a god.
So, what to do? How to proceed? How to find a way to make sense of the world and our place in it and to find meaningful differences between the overwhelming number of choices we all face every day? In what the authors feel may seem a surprising turnabout to readers, they ask the question how we declined from the wonder and glory of Greece to our sorry state in the modern world. The next four chapters of the book offer snapshots of various stages of that decline. We start with "Homer's Polytheism" and a discussion of The Odyssey in chapter 3, and move to Aeschylus and Augustine in chapter 4, Dante and Kant in chapter 5, and to Melville in Chapter 6.
In the world described by Homer--in the world originated by Homer--we find men and women who are open to being "swept up" by one or more of the divinities. When one of these attuning ones acted upon (and with) a Greek man or woman, they embraced the wave and rose up with the great swell, being carried forward into action. But, this phenomenon was neither active, autonomous, self-directed action, nor something totally passive and receptive about which one had no choice. In a wonderful endnote the authors mention the existence of the "middle voice" in Attic Greek which is something in between the passive and active voice. In our modern grammar we have the active--"John threw the ball"--and we have the passive--"John was thrown by the bull"--but we don't have that middle voice whereby your action is called out of you by the situation and the surroundings--by an attunement, or by something that attunes you to important realities inherent in your surroundings. Homer uses the middle voice, we are told, when Athena prompted Odysseus's hands to reach out and grab a passing rock and thus save himself from being smashed into the rocky shore. Odysseus was neither totally active, nor totally passive.
According to the authors, this is in fact how most modern day "heroes" describe their heroic acts. It wasn't that they intellectually decided to do such and such a heroic act, they tell us, it was that they just saw the situation and acted: "I just saw someone who needed help. Anyone would have done the same thing." Indeed, many people may have also seen someone who needed help, and yet they didn't do anything, caught up in their own thoughts and in the possibilities, still caught up in the Enlightenment mode of being an autonomous individual. "Heroes", however, can often be said not to experience themselves as the source of their actions. In Homer's world, a hero would have said, like Odysseus, that it was "Athena's work." (or the work of some other divinity). Today, we do not have this option. Dreyfus and Kelly would like to lay the theoretical and philosophical ground-work that will give us all this option back. Like the Buddha, they offer a "middle way" between two evils.
The final chapter, "Conclusion: Lives Worth Living in a Secular Age" deals directly with this topic, having had the way prepared for it by the previous chapters. Dreyfus and Kelly would like us to feel gratitude towards the world. They feel that this is the best response even to situations that most of us would just view as lucky--the roll of the impartial dice. They discuss both a scene in The Odyssey where six spears thrown at point black range all fail to find their mark in Odysseus, and a similar scene in Pulp Fiction where six bullets shot from a handgun all miss Jules and Vincent. Jules insists that it is a miracle from God, whereas Vincent just says that sometimes stuff just happens. While the authors don't believe--and don't want us to believe--that a supernatural being caused the bullets to miss somehow or other, they still insist that one should feel grateful and cared for in such an event. The trick to leading an intense and meaningful life, they tell us, is to be open to being swept up by such moods. Helen of Troy, despite causing the Trojan War and leaving her husband to run of with Paris, was acting with "arete", with excellence, by being responsive to Aphrodite's call. Later, the wave passed and the mood subsided and she returned to her husband, and was responsive to Hera's call, to the domestic dimension in life, without feeling the need to rank, reconcile, or compare the two dimensions or moralize her actions. THIS is what POLYTHEISM truly means. It means that there is no overarching mono-logic consideration that can rank and adjudicate the gods and goddess and the realities, the domains, over which they preside. To decline from this to monotheism is to narrow the range and wonder of human life from its multi-dimensional richness in Homor, to the nothingness of a line, a single dimension, in the modern world.
The authors immediately raise the problem of Hitler, of course. The people at Hitler's rallies were definitely open and responsive to being swept-up by the wave, so to speak! How can one embrace a meaningful life if the danger of the Holocaust or war or lynchings or similar things is the consequence? The authors' solution to this problem is something they call "meta-poiesis" and they develop it from considering a craftperson, such as a wheelwright. Meta-poiesis allows one to learn the craft of living and to know when to give in and become responsive, and when to walk away. In addition, people must discover what they like and turn these things into rituals. Perhaps the morning cup of coffee becomes a ritual, because one discovers that it is more than just a caffeine delivery system, or perhaps it is something else. Not everything will shine, but all the shining things will shine.
OK. That's the recap. Now to my commentary. First of all, the notion that the modern age is suffering from loss of meaning and nihilism is pretty much inaccurate, in my opinion. Most people are OK. Plenty of people do lead intense and meaningful lives. Further, there were plenty of people in Ancient Greece who probably were not leading the intense and meaningful lives Dreyfus and Kelly so admire in Homer's characters--like, for example, say, maybe the SLAVES.
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