All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular AgePaul Schumann

This book by Dreyfus and Kelly was enjoyable to read. However, it was difficult to comprehend.

The book covers the following topics:

Our Contemporary Nihilism David Foster Wallace’s Nihilism Homer’s Polytheism From Aeschylus to Augustine: Monotheism on the Rise From Dante to Kant: The Attractions and Dangers of Autonomy Fanaticism, Polytheism and Melville’s “Evil Art” Conclusion: Lives Worth Living in a Secular Age

The authors begin the book with a quote from Melville’s1 Moby Dick, a novel that plays a critical role in their analysis:

If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birthright, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; on the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.

This is a good summary of the book. The authors trace the development of the great philosophical ideas through the writings of Western authors from the polytheism2 of Greece to the monotheistic3 religions of the Mid East to the nihilism4 of the modern West. They end the book with a new type of polytheism appropriate to our times that the authors believe will restore purpose to our lives.

One of my favorite poets is William Wordsworth who expressed some similar views through his poetry of the early 1800s:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

1 Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd. Wikipedia2 Polytheism is the belief in and worship of many gods. Typically, these gods are distinguished by particular functions, and often take on human characteristics. Polytheism3 Monotheism is the belief in the existence of one god, as distinguished from polytheism, the belief in more than one god, and atheism, the absence of belief in any god. Wikipedia4 Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. Wikipedia

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Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be

A Pagan5 suckled in a creed outworn

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus6 rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton7 blow his wreathed horn.

The authors state their purpose in their Note to the Reader:

The world doesn't matter to us the way it used to. The intense and meaningful lives of Homer's8 Greeks, and the grand hierarchy of meaning that structured Dante's medieval Christian world, both stand in stark contrast to our secular 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.

The issues motivating our story are philosophical and literary, and we come at them from our professional background in these disciplines. But All Things Shining is intended for a nonspecialist audience, and we hope it will speak to a wide range of people. Anyone who lives in the contemporary world has the background to read it, and anyone who hopes to enrich his or her life by experiencing it in the light of classic philosophical and literary works can hope to find something here. 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

5 Paganism is a blanket term, typically used to refer to polytheistic religious traditions. Wikipedia6 In Greek mythology, Proteus is an early sea-god, one of several deities whom Homer calls the "Old Man of the Sea", whose name suggests the "first", as protogonos is the "primordial" or the "firstborn". Wikipedia7 Triton is a mythological Greek god, the messenger of the sea. Wikipedia8 In the Western classical tradition Homer is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics are at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature. Wikipedia

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sadness 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 use of the word shining in the title and throughout the book is not a common usage. Furthermore, the authors never define the term in the book. And, I haven’t found a completely satisfying definition via a search of the Internet. The first thing to make clear about the word is that is not shinny. A shinny object reflects the light from another source. A shining object is luminous. Probably the closest definition is the third one in Merriam-Webster: Luminous is brilliant intellectually; enlightened or enlightening, as a writer or a writer's works: a luminous concept; luminous prose. Log24 provides some leads notably Stephen Mitchell’s 1989 translation from the Odes of Solomon9:

You have made all things new;

You have showed me all things shining.

And, the use of the word in Terrance Malick’s 1998 film The Thin Red Line. Brian Volcek in the Ekklesia Project describes the usage:

In Terrence Malick’s luminous 1998 movie, The Thin Red Line, a frightened recruit, Private Train, wonders if the human suffering and natural brokenness he sees everywhere in Guadalcanal signify,”…an avenging power in nature? Not one power, but two?”

At movie’s end, he knows he’s lived through more suffering and brokenness than most ever will and resolves to live better. Among his fellow soldiers he again wonders, “Where is it that we were together? Who were you that I lived with? The brother. The friend. Darkness, light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind? The features of the same face?”

The films final words are his, spoken – to whom remains unclear – as the green island where suffering and death reigned disappears in the boat’s wake: “Oh, my soul! Let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining.”

In the All Things Shining blog, the authors provide three kinds of shining from Homer:

1. The light that characterizes the phenomenology of startling, unexpected shifts in the mood or situation. This is paradigmatically10 associated with the light of Zeus’s lightening bolt. Like lightening, you notice it when it happens – it calls attention to itself. And also, it’s necessarily momentary, since it marks a transition from one mood or situation to another. Example: “Zeus…tears away his triumph all in a lightening flash.” See also Aphrodite and the chin strap. Notice

9 The Odes of Solomon is a collection of 42 odes attributed to Solomon. Various scholars have dated the composition of these religious poems to anywhere in the range of the first three centuries AD. The original language of the Odes is thought to have been either Greek or Syriac, and to be generally Christian in background. Wikipedia10 Of or relating to a paradigm. Free Dictionary

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that Zeus’s lightening bolt is never associated with storms, since these are the domain of Poseidon, but rather comes strictly out of the blue.

2. The blazing power of shining heroes and gods when they’re at their best, for example fighting “brilliantly.” When somebody is manifesting their excellence at something, we say in English, they really ‘shine.’ One notices, or can notice, this kind of radiance, as when we say the bride was radiant on her wedding day. But the radiance can also just change your relation to the person, your way of treating them or responding to them, and indeed your way of understanding yourself and the whole situation, without your noticing the radiance itself. So one can either look at the radiant being as radiant (Marylyn Monroe, Aphrodite as golden, shining Hektor) or see the situation in the light of their radiance. Manifesting excellence happens suddenly too, like the lightening bolt, but like a fire it endures, lingers, and is only gradually extinguished – phusis11. Example: . “Hector shining all about with fire leapt among the throng…” When one notices a shining hero or god it is like seeing flow from the outside; the shining person is acting in flow, and you experience his flow as a shining. If it draws you to get in sync with it, as it usually does, then one transitions to the third form of light.

3. The light that attunes people to each other and to their shared situation when they’re in flow together. This light must not be noticed or it will disrupt the flow. Examples: in which Athene shines light upon both sides of the army and in this light they see the situation – Hector, etc. – clearly. Here Homer says that Athene has shined the light, but none of the characters see it, they only see the things it illuminates. See also Odysseus in which Telemachus interrupts the flow of the situation because he notices the light of the working gods and Odysseus warns that one must not pay attention to it. A particular version of this can also be found in the case of mood. For example, Aphrodite shines on Helen and Paris so that the erotic aspect of the situation shine, and one is drawn to respond to them.

These three categories of shining highlight Homer’s sensitivity to phenomena of embodiment that have been covered up since Plato, and have been replaced in our Enlightenment era by Descartes and Kant’s emphasis on will and agency. They characterize Homer’s glorification of our kind of being as existing along a spectrum of kinds and degrees of bodily receptivity – from the lack of receptivity given to one in sleep to the receptivity to particular affordances like tasty food, to the full in-sync receptivity of embedded-ness in the shared situation with others – all of which Kant would have denigrated as heteronomous12 determinations of the will. In Kant’s account of the enlightenment man becomes the source of all light and intelligibility and his freely chosen actions are the paradigmatic exercise of his autonomous will. By contrast, Homer characterizes man as responsive to a light given to him from outside by the shining of the gods and heroes.

11 Phusis, goddess of nature: Orphic Hymn 10 to Phusis (trans. Taylor) (Greek hymns C3rd B.C. to 2nd A.D.) :"To Phusis (Nature), Fumigation from Aromatics. Phusis, all-parent, ancient and divine, o much mechanic mother, art is thine; heavenly, abundant, venerable queen, in every part of thy dominions seen. Untamed, all taming, ever splendid light, all ruling, honoured, and supremely bright. Immortal, Protogeneia (First-Born), ever still the same, nocturnal, starry, shining, powerful dame. Physis12 Heteronomy refers to action that is influenced by a force outside the individual. Immanuel Kant, drawing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, considered such an action nonmoral. Wikipedia

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The authors’ also use the term whoosh and whooshing up without a clear definition. The examples they use are mostly around great athletic events where the crowd gets caught up in unison in a great feeling of unity, and to a certain extent transcendence13. This seems to me to be related to the concept of flow14 proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. It seems to occur in the authors’ context when experiencing a shining object , event or person.

Rollo May15 in My Quest for Beauty16 describes beauty in terms similar to shining:

Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously. Other happenings give us joy and afterwards a peace, but in beauty these are the same experience. Beauty is serene and at the same time exhilarating; it increases one's sense of being alive. Beauty gives us not only a feeling of wonder; it imparts to us at the same moment timelessness, a repose - which why we speak of beauty as being eternal.

Beauty creates an aesthetic arrest. Lorin Roche in Meditation 24-7 describes aesthetic arrest in this way:

The phrase, "Aesthetic Arrest" was first used by James Joyce17 in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

As opposed to the totally boring idea that in meditation, you are supposed to blank your mind, James Joyce proposed a gorgeous idea: when we are in the presence of great beauty, our minds go still. Think about that for a few days. It's a radical and refreshing notion.

I would go further, and propose a sutra18, a replacement sutra for the second verse of the Yoga Sutras19. It could go something like this:

Attending to the beauty of the rhythms of nature, the mind enters stillness like the ocean at dawn.

13 Transcendence, transcendent, and transcendental are words that refer to an object (or a property of an object) as being comparatively beyond that of other objects. Such objects (or properties) transcend other objects (or properties) in some way. Wikipedia14 Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields. Wikipedia15 Rollo May was an American existential psychologist. He authored the influential book Love and Will during 1969. He is often associated with both humanistic psychology and existentialist philosophy. May was a close friend of the theologian Paul Tillich. His works include Love and Will and The Courage to Create, the latter title honoring Tillich's The Courage to Be. Wikipedia16 My Quest for Beauty, Paul Schumann, Scrbed17 James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark novel which perfected his stream of consciousness technique and combined nearly every literary device available in a modern re-telling of The Odyssey. Wikipedia18 Sūtra literally means Peace, a thread or line that holds things together, and more metaphorically refers to an aphorism (or line, rule, formula) or a collection of such aphorisms in the form of a manual. Wikipedia19 The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali is a Hindu scripture and foundational text of Yoga. Though brief, the Yoga Sutras are an enormously influential work on yoga philosophy and practice. Wikipedia

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Joseph Campbell20 helped to make the idea known, in his lectures on Joyce: "The aesthetic experience is a simple beholding of the object....you experience a radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest." This radiance, the perception of beauty, is regarded as a communication of the hidden power behind the world, shining through some physical form…

In addition to being transcendent, shining things also seem to be numinous.21

My experience with this type of usage of shining came from a very different source. I was doing some consulting for an organization in Riverton, Wyoming on a Shining Times Living History Museum and Trading Post. The shining time is this context was a brief period in the 1800s when the mountain men lived in and off the mountains of the west particularity the Rocky Mountains. The mountain men were trappers who underwent great hardships to make a living from the animals, especially beaver. In spite of life being tough, the survivors considered their lives good in the shining times. Although romanticized, they lived mostly peaceful lives with the Indians and in harmony with nature priding themselves on not destroying the environment. Even with the hardships they were able to observe the shining things of nature.

In the chapter titled David Foster Wallace’s Nihilism the authors write about two of Wallace’s books – Infinite Jest22 and his unfinished manuscript known as The Pale King 23– and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love24.

Infinite Jest clocks in at a full 1,079 pages, including almost 100 pages of weighty endnotes, and it now stands as the principal contender for what serious literature can aspire to in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The novel takes on addiction, depression,

20 Joseph John Campbell was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience. His philosophy is often summarized by his phrase: "Follow your bliss." Wikipedia21 Numinous is an English adjective describing the power or presence of a divinity. The word was popularized in the early twentieth century by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his influential book Das Heilige (translated into English as The Idea of the Holy). According to Otto the numinous experience has two aspects: mysterium tremendum, which is the tendency to invoke fear and trembling; and mysterium fascinans the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel. The numinous experience also has a personal quality to it, in that the person feels to be in communion with a Holy other. The numinous experience can lead in different cases to belief in deities, the supernatural, the sacred, the holy, and the transcendent. Wikipedia22 Infinite Jest is a 1996 novel by David Foster Wallace that presents a dystopian vision of North America in the near future. The intricate narrative treats elements as diverse as junior tennis, substance abuse and recovery programs, depression, child abuse, family relationships, advertising and popular entertainment, film theory, and Quebec separatism. In 2005 Time magazine included the book in its list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923. Wikipedia23 The Pale King is an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace, published posthumously on April 15, 2011. After Wallace's death in September 2008, a manuscript and associated computer files were found by his widow, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell. That material was compiled by his friend and editor Michael Pietsch into the form that was eventually published. Wallace had been working on the novel for over a decade. Even incomplete, The Pale King is a long work, with 50 chapters of varying length totaling over 500 pages. Wikipedia24 Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia is a 2006 memoir by American author Elizabeth Gilbert. The memoir chronicles the author's trip around the world after her divorce and what she discovered during her travels. Wikipedia

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consumerism, terrorism, and tennis academies, among many other characteristic late-twentieth-century problems. It is-both stylistically and substantively-a detailed and deeply perceptive attempt to say what it is to be a fucking human being in America at the turn of the millennium.

And what exactly is that like? "There's something particularly sad about it," Wallace said, in a 1996 interview with the online journal Salon,

something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness25.

This lostness may simply have been the physiological depression that Wallace had battled his whole adult life. But there is another possibility too. Perhaps Wallace was not so much describing his own personal depression as he was describing aspects of the culture that that depression made him sensitive to. Aspects that others might well overlook, or cover up, or otherwise avoid-aspects of modern existence that we all live through but fail to see. Perhaps, in other words, his depression made him peculiarly sensitive to something that pervades the culture, something not personal and individual but public and shared. And perhaps his job as a writer was to reveal that aspect of ourselves to us. That, at any rate, is how Wallace seems to have seen it:

The sadness that the book is about, and that I was going through, was a real American type of sadness. I was white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated, had had way more career success than I could have legitimately hoped for and was sort of adrift. A lot of my friends were the same way. Some of them were deeply into drugs, others were unbelievable workaholics. Some were going to singles bars every night. You could see it played out in 20 different ways, but it's the same thing.

And later in the interview he talks about this sadness and lostness as a mood-an American mood-that results from the inability of our culture, or certain segments of our culture, to confront the deepest questions about who we are:

I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enter our early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values.

Later they write:

Elizabeth Gilbert's world is different from Wallace's, no doubt, but not because it is lacking the anxiety, depression, and downright sadness that Wallace saw. The opening pages of her memoir find her sobbing inconsolably on the bathroom floor of her big house in the suburbs of New York.

Moreover, Gilbert's unhappiness is motivated by precisely the kind of lostness that Wallace sees everywhere. Hers is one particular manifestation of this modern American lostness, of course, one particular way of being adrift. But it is a species of the Wallacian phenomenon nevertheless.

25 The quality of being lost. Wiktionary

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As Wallace himself said: "You could see it played out in twenty different ways, but it's the same thing." Liz Gilbert on that bathroom floor could have been a character in a Wallace scene.

The goal of both Wallace and Gilbert is to show the reader a way of the nightmare. Starting first with Gilbert:

The burden of her story, instead, is to show us how one can go forth from that dark place, to tell us what it takes to emerge into the light.

So too, Wallace. Early on in his career, he insisted that his goal as a writer was to show us a way out of our predicament, not to glamorize the awfulness. As he told Larry McCaffery in a 1991 interview:

Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.

That is the real reason that Wallace and Gilbert are appropriate for this book: not because they sense the lostness of the age-this dark age was alive already in Eliot's Wasteland26 and Beckett's Endgame27, and countless other testimonies from the early part of the twentieth century. No, what makes these contemporary authors worth reading instead is that they are trying to find a way into the light. In seeing how they fail, we will prepare ourselves to search for the sacred possibilities still alive in the modern world.

Wallace gave a commencement day speech to the graduating class of Kenyon College in 2005.:

The cliché that Wallace attempts to revivify in the Kenyon speech is the old pedagogical cliché that a liberal arts education teaches you how to think.

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that [this] cliché ... is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

26 The Waste Land is a 434-line Modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Wikipedia27 Endgame, by Samuel Beckett, is a one-act play with four characters, written in a style associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. Wikipedia

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The skill of exercising control over how and what you think is precisely the skill that Lane Dean, Jr28., is struggling to master; it is the skill of choosing to think about the tax return you are now completing-and only that-instead of losing control and hopping the wall.

The bizarre genius of the commencement speech is that it finds this struggle everywhere in life: in traffic jams and crowded supermarket aisles, in soul-killing muzak and corporate pop; in the "stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman" faces that stand as obstacles to our daily chore; even in "Have a nice day" from the checkout girl, said "in a voice that is the absolute voice of death." Indeed, Wallace finds the struggle against banality, boredom, anger, and frustration in all the "dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines" that make up our lives "day after week after month after year." This is the existence from which Wallace offers us reprieve.

Later, the authors’ expand on Wallace’s views:

God cast no shadow at all in the world of Infinite Jest.

Nietzsche’s29 world had not declined so far. Nineteenth-century European culture on the whole still took for granted that the Judeo-Christian virtues were not only proper but sanctioned by God. Nietzsche could see that this was changing, that the background practices of the culture were pulling away from their supports, but he believed that the full transformation of the culture was still far in the future. Even so, he shared with Wallace the nihilistic idea that, once that transformation had finally occurred-as it has in Wallace's world-the lone source of meaning in human existence would be the strong individual's force of will.

The "free spirit" is Nietzsche's name for the individual who lives properly after the death of God. This free spirit is no longer constrained by any external norms at all for what it is appropriate or permissible to do. It is literally true for the free spirit, as Dostoyevsky worried it would be, that since there is no God, everything is permitted. Nietzsche-perhaps wriggling free from the overbearing constraint of a father and two grandfathers who held important positions in the Lutheran church-saw this as a joyous possibility indeed.

But there is no joy in Wallace's world. It is as if the true burden of this responsibility-the responsibility to escape from the meaninglessness and drudgery of a godless world by constructing a happier meaning for it out of nothing, literally ex nihilo as God himself once had done-was too much for any human spirit to achieve. It is a possibility that requires us to become gods ourselves.

Wallace saw, at least subliminally, what his view would cost. Look again at a key passage from the commencement speech. What is required, Wallace writes, is incredibly difficult; nobody will

28 Lane Dean, Jr. is a character in Wallace’s Pale King whose life as a tax examiner is deadly boring.29 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism. Wikipedia

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fault you if you can't manage it yourself. But choosing to look differently at the miserable and annoying and frustrating moments of existence, choosing to experience them nevertheless as happy, meaningful, sacred, perhaps even full of bliss-that is what we must learn to do.

If you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

This personal responsibility to essentially recreate the world at every instant is a very large burden. Gilbert has a different view:

About Wallace's Nietzschean-type approach she says:

I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. You know, I think that allowing somebody ... to believe that he or she is ... the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.

The idea that we must "become gods ourselves" as Nietzsche says, that we must become the source of all "divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery," this dramatically self-aggrandizing view was indeed prefigured by the Renaissance notion of genius-and of rational humanism more generally. And we think Gilbert is right to resist it. It's not just too much responsibility for the human psyche, as she points out, but it's probably inconsistent with what are deeply human kinds of comfort and happiness too, as we will see in Melville. So on this issue we side with Gilbert over Wallace.

But there are disadvantages to Gilbert's pure receptivity view as well. For if the poem is a purely external force that rumbles through us-if the sacred and the divine and the meaningful can't be earned but depend on God's inscrutable grace-then this receptive view is just as incapacitating as Wallace's kind of Nietzschean nihilism. Whereas Wallace gives us an unachievable task, Gilbert gives us no task at all. We can pray for inspiration from the genius, of course, just as the mature Luther can pray for the grace of God. But what really matters in the end has nothing to do with how we live our lives. What matters is only whether we happen to be near a pencil at the moment the poem rumbles through. Perhaps this is good news for pencil companies, but the rest of us can feel little joy in such a vision.

The question that remains is whether Gilbert and Wallace between them have completely covered the terrain. In Wallace's Nietzschean view, we are the sole active agents in the universe, responsible for generating out of nothing whatever notion of the sacred and divine there can ever be. Gilbert, by contrast, takes a kind of mature Lutheran view. On her account we are purely passive recipients of God's divine will, nothing but receptacles for the grace he may choose to

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offer. Is there anything in between? We think there is, and we will try to develop it in the final chapter of the book.

The intervening chapters are interesting to read and full of insights. I particularly like the analysis of Moby Dick.

In the final chapter, the authors begin with the use of several sports analogies that most of us have experienced, the feeling of getting caught up in the moment of a great athletic performance.

There are four points to notice about the sacred moments in sport, points that start to fill in what Wallace could not see. First, in the truly extraordinary moments, something overwhelming occurs. It wells up and carries you along as on a powerful wave. The wave metaphor is crucial here. When a wave is at its most powerful it is a solid foundation that can support as many riders as will fit upon it. It can even sweep up more as it runs along. But when the wave passes, nothing but its memory survives. Try to stand upon the still water and you'll find that the supporting foundation is gone. These moments of sport are like that. When you are in the midst of them, riding the wave, they carry you along and give meaning to life. As Borgmann30 says:

At the beginning of a real game, there is no way of predicting or controlling what will happen. No one can produce or guarantee the flow of a game. It unfolds and reveals itself in the playing. It inspires grace and despair, it provokes heroics and failure, it infuses enthusiasm and inflicts misery. It is always greater than the individuals it unites.

But the meaning they give is temporary. One can remember having been caught up in the excitement of the play, having been taken over and directed by the situation. But the memory tells you nothing about how to act once the situation is gone. This makes our contemporary notion of the sacred and the real radically different from many others we are familiar with. This situational notion of what grounds our existence, for example, is nothing like the eternal, everlasting kind of certainty and security that philosophers from Plato to Descartes to Kant desired. And it is nothing like the monotheistic, unified kind of certainty that the Judeo-Christian religions offer either. Rather, this pre-Axial31 kind of certainty is transient and multiple and it requires care. As Homer knows it carries you along for a while but it cannot last forever.

Second, this characteristic of the sacred as we experience it in our culture ties it very closely to the Homeric Greek conception of what is real. In Homer's age the name for nature, or what there is, was physis32. This is the word from which our word physics derives. Physics today is likewise

30 Albert Borgmann is an American philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of technology. He was born in Freiburg, Germany, and is a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana. Wikipedia31 Summary of pre-Axial religious life: Focused on the forces of nature, people practiced rituals that helped them influence the gods that were themselves aspects of nature and controlled it. People believed in a symbiotic relationship between the gods and themselves. These responsible powers needed human assistance (sacrifice). They believed in sympathetic magic – things having been in contact with each other continue to affect each other. The sacred and secular were not sharply distinguished. The Human Journey32 Physis is a Greek theological, philosophical, and scientific term usually translated into English as "nature." In The Odyssey, Homer uses the word once (its earliest known occurrence), referring to the intrinsic way of growth of a

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the study of what there is, but we now have a very different conception of what there is than Homer had. For us, the ultimate elements of nature are quarks and leptons and other subatomic particles that have mass and charge. Or perhaps the ultimate constituents are minuscule multidimensional strings that vibrate. Or maybe the final physics will tell us something different still. But whatever physics ends up saying about the universe, the story it gives will be a story about basic constituents and the laws that govern how they casually interact. For Homer this notion of reality isn't wrong on the facts, as if some other physical, causal story could get it right. Instead, for Homer, the causal account starts in the wrong place altogether. For the word physis in Homeric times wasn't the name of some ultimate constituent of the universe; it was the name for the way the most real things in the world present themselves to us.

The most important things, the most real things in Homer's world, well up and take us over, hold us for a while, and then, finally, let us go. If we had to translate Homer's word physis, then whooshing is about as close as we can get. What there really is, for Homer, is whooshing up: the whooshing up of shining Achilles in the midst of battle, or of an overwhelming eroticism in the presence of a radiant stranger like Paris; the whooshing up of a rock in the turbulent sea that calls forth Odysseus's hand to grab it. These were the shining moments of reality in Homer's world. And whooshing up is what happens in the context of the great moment in contemporary sport as well. When something whooshes up it focuses and organizes everything around it. The great athlete in the midst of the play rises up and shines-all attention is drawn to him. And everyone around him-the players on the field, the coaches on the sidelines, the fans in the stadium, the announcers in the booth-everyone understands who they are and what they are to do immediately in relation to the sacred event that is occurring. In Homer's world what whooshes up is what really shines and matters most. And we can still sense this in the moment of sport.

It is worth emphasizing that this Homeric notion of reality is orthogonal to our contemporary scientific understanding-they are simply not explaining the same kinds of things. Indeed, one could embrace both notions-and we think one should embrace both notions-without any conflict. The scientific conception of what there is focuses on the causal basis of reality; Homer's account, by contrast, describes the way the most important or meaningful moments of existence present themselves to us. Of course it is true that meaningful events-like great moments in sport-involve entities that have a causal basis. But the causal structure of the leg muscles in Lou Gehrig's33 left

particular species of plant. In other very early uses it had such a meaning: related to the growth of plants, animals, and other features of the world as they tend to develop without external influence. In the pre-Socratic philosophers it developed a complex of other meanings. The word physis occurs very early in Greek philosophy, and in several senses; generally, these senses match rather well the current senses in which the English word nature is used. The etymology of the word "physical" shows its use as a synonym for "natural" in about the mid-15th century. Since Aristotle, the physical (the subject matter of physics, "natural things") has often been contrasted with metaphysical (the subject of metaphysics)."Physis" was understood by Thoreau as coming from darkness into light, biologically, cosmically, cognitively (Walden Pond, 'Spring'). Leo Strauss felt this was a sign of something new in the world which the Greeks discovered – something distinct from the concept of a "way" (see dharma and tao). Wikipedia

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thigh is neither here nor there when it comes to the question what it is like to be caught up in the response to one of his extraordinary plays or his moving farewell.

The third point to make is that the physis phenomenon is not unique to sport. It may be that in our culture sport provides the central locus for the phenomenon-that in general it is in the context of Sport that contemporary Americans are most likely to feel this sense of community and focused meaning, this sense of understanding exactly what one is about, if only for a while. But that is not to say it can't happen in other contexts too. Many people, for instance, felt their sense of themselves and their world come into focus during the speech by Martin Luther King Jr. on the National Mall. For someone else it might happen occasionally in the context of an important family meal at Thanksgiving. Perhaps some other folks feel this kind of focused, communal meaning taking them over in the context of the classroom. There is nothing in our position that requires the story to focus on sports. It's just that this is the place in contemporary American culture where the phenomenon seems most familiar.

But the sports example is important for another reason too, and this brings us to the fourth point we want to make. Namely, there is something inherently dangerous in the phenomenon we are describing. Inherently dangerous and perhaps even repellent. We need now to address this final point about physis.

First we need to notice that to be overtaken by some potent force is to have one's actions no longer completely under one's control. When I find myself rising as one with the crowd in the presence of some great athletic feat, there is an important sense in which I am not the source of my own activity. It is my muscles, of course, that generate the motor actions-straightening the legs, raising the arms, emitting the inarticulate utterance that means "Hooray!" But there is a strong sense in which I perform these movements without ever having decided to do so. The activity is out of my control in the sense that I do not perform it voluntarily. It's not as if I was forced to jump up and cheer either, of course. It was always an option for me to adopt a kind of ironic distance from the situation, or even, as our colleague recommends, to walk away. But so long as I find myself taken over by the situation, there is an important sense in which I am no longer the source of my own activity.

From the point of view of the Enlightenment, this condition is appalling. In a famous essay, Kant34 argued that "enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity." To be immature, in the Kantian sense, just is to allow oneself to act in ways that one has not chosen freely on one's own. Failing to resist the madness of crowds is a prime example. Maturity, by contrast, is having the resolve and courage to use one's own understanding in choosing how to

33 Henry Louis "Lou" Gehrig, nicknamed "The Iron Horse" for his durability, was an American Major League Baseball first baseman. He played his entire 17-year baseball career for the New York Yankees (1923–1939). Gehrig set several major league records. He holds the record for most career grand slams (23). Gehrig is chiefly remembered for his prowess as a hitter, his consecutive games-played record and its subsequent longevity, and the pathos of his farewell from baseball at age 36, when he was stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Wikipedia34 Immanuel Kant was a professor of philosophy at Königsberg, in Prussia (modern Russia), researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology during and at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment. Wikipedia

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act, without guidance from anyone or anything external to oneself. The mature thing to do at the baseball game therefore, in this Kantian sense of maturity, is to resist the power of the community response in order to decide as a rational individual what the appropriate response to the situation should be. One might well decide that an athletic feat merits applause, and if so, one might express one's approval appropriately. But rising as one with the crowd is out of the question.

This might sound like a boring way to act at a baseball game, but there is sense behind Kant's caution. There is, after all, a vanishingly small distance between rising as one with the crowd at a baseball game and rising as one with the crowd at a Hitler rally. Indeed, insofar as Lou Gehrig's farewell address is properly considered an act of rhetoric instead of an act of athletic greatness proper, perhaps the distance there is smaller still. So the power of the whooshing up phenomenon is revealed to be Janus-faced35. If we cannot articulate a distinction between Lou Gehrig's farewell and Hitler's taking over, then perhaps Kantian maturity, though relatively boring, really is the wisest course.

Is the choice we face, then, one between a life of boring but mature and moral activities, on the one hand, and a life of risky-potentially even abhorrent-but nevertheless meaningful ones, on the other? No. 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. Already in Dante36, for example, the assertion of the individual's autonomous will was a rebellion against the source of meaning in the world. And Melville's Ahab was "daft from strength" in something like this sense as well. His need to find a clear, articulate, and completely certain answer to the question of his individual place in the universe, that monomaniacal need to find out whether he is at the center of it all, was in Melville's view, a deeply tragic flaw.

And perhaps our contemporary situation is even worse. David Foster Wallace's need to create meaning ex nihilo out of the individual puts him in the traditional position of God, a position that Nietzsche embraced as well. But Wallace's exploration of this God-like position led him ultimately to feel both that it was necessary for a meaningful existence and that he could neither understand nor live it himself. If these authors have got the phenomena clearly in mind, then individualist autonomy, it seems, leads at least to wickedness or tragedy, and more likely to nihilism or even suicide. The Enlightenment embrace of this kind of metaphysical individualism, in such a view, was indeed a dramatic turn in the history of the West. But rather than standing as the final and most advanced stage in the history of our understanding of who we are, it seems

35 In ancient Roman religion and mythology, Janus is the god of beginnings and transitions, thence also of gates, doors, doorways, endings and time. Most often he is depicted as having two heads, facing opposite directions: one head looks eastward and the other westward. Symbolically they look simultaneously into the future and the past, back at the last year and forward at the new. Wikipedia36 Durante degli Alighieri, commonly known as Dante, was a major Italian poet of the Middle Ages. His Divine Comedy, originally called Commedia and later called Divina by Boccaccio, is considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature. Wikipedia

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instead to be the final step in the decline from Luther to Descartes to Kant to Nietzsche, a self-conception that destroys the possibility of a meaningful and worthwhile existence.

As an antidote to this condition we have been arguing that the basic phenomenon of Homeric polytheism-the whooshing up that focuses one for a while and then lets one go-is still available in American culture today. This source of meaning, of course, stands in direct contrast with the ideals of Enlightenment individualism, for at least the simple reason that whooshing up takes its start in the response of a community rather than of the individual.

…

And the moment of exultation in a ballgame can be like that as well: one wishes it would last forever while knowing that it can't. That sort of moment offers what autonomy cannot: a sense that you are participating in something that transcends what you can contribute to it.

There is something enormously hopeful in the idea that we might be able to resist the sense that life is meaningless by appropriating and developing our receptivity to this ancient phenomenon. And if things were easy we would be able to stop the story here. But the potential cost of this appropriation is apparently prohibitive. For surely no way of living that leaves us open to fascist rhetoricians is tenable. We are stuck, therefore, between Scylla and Charybdis37 : a nihilistic and meaningless life on one side, a meaningful but potentially abhorrent one on the other.

The authors resolve this problem by introducing another concept from Greek philosophy, poieses38 and skill development:

Everything we have said so far is in vain if we can't avoid the danger to which Homer leaves himself open. The correct response to this danger begins with the observation that fortunately, besides ecstatic physis, there are other sacred practices left in our culture. Properly understood and appropriated, these other notions of the sacred preserve physis at its best while forbidding its repellent manifestations. Before we can understand this response to the dangers of physis, however, we need to examine a kind of sacred practice still available at the margins of our culture that will lay the groundwork for putting physis in its proper place.

That nurturing practice was called poiesis. Until about a hundred years ago, the cultivating and nurturing practices of poiesis organized a central way things mattered. The poietic style manifested itself, among other places, in the craftsman's skills for bringing things out at their best. This is an ancient practice in the culture that was already recognized in Homer's world where Hephaestus, the craft god, brought forth shining things, and Homer's Greeks stood in

37 Being between Scylla and Charybdis is an idiom deriving from Greek mythology. Several other idioms, such as "on the horns of a dilemma" and "between the devil and the deep blue sea" express the same meaning of "having to choose between two evils". Wikipedia38 Poiesis is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek term that means "to make". This word, the root of our modern "poetry", was first a verb, an action that transforms and continues the world. Neither technical production nor creation in the romantic sense, poietic work reconciles thought with matter and time, and man with the world. Wikipedia

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wonder before them. But Hephaestus was a marginal figure in the Homeric Greek pantheon. It wasn't until Aeschylus that Athena's poietic style of bringing the culture out at its best organized the understanding of everything that is. This cultivating, craftsman-like, poietic understanding of how to bring out meanings at their best was alive and well into the late nineteenth century, but it is under attack in our technological age.

Martin Heidegger39 refers to it as a 'bringing-forth', using this term in its widest sense. He explained poiesis as the blooming of the blossom, the coming-out of a butterfly from a cocoon, the plummeting of a waterfall when the snow begins to melt. The last two analogies underline Heidegger's example of a threshold occasion: a moment of ecstasis40 when something moves away from its standing as one thing to become another. In The Symposium 41 Plato describes how mortals strive for immortality in relation to poieses. In all begetting and bringing forth upon the beautiful there is a kind of making/creating or poiesis. In this genesis there is a movement beyond the temporal cycle of birth and decay. "Such a movement can occur in three kinds of poiesis: (1) Natural poiesis through sexual procreation, (2) poiesis in the city through the attainment of heroic fame and finally, and (3) poiesis in the soul through the cultivation of virtue and knowledge." Levine argues in Poiesis 42that poiesis is a creative act.

Donna Lynn Trueit in Complexifying the Poetic43 also argues for poiesis. “Inspired by philosopher Richard Rorty’s44 assertion that we need poetic imagination to move beyond modernity, this pragmatist inquiry seeks to understand the poetic, not as it is rationally defined, but rather as a historically situated discursive practice.” Later she writes, “Poiesis, etymological root of the word poetic, is related to making meaning through interactions with others, with the environment/ cosmos, and reflexively to develop a sense of being-in-relation. Knowledge, in this schema, is fluid, evolving, situated, communal, and is based on patterns.” And, “Pragmatist logic, based on triadic reasoning45, draws on poiesis as an organizing principle of reason and its representation, and is a bridge to complexity theory.”46

Derek Whitehead in “Poiesis and Art-Making: A Way of Letting Be47”, writes “I suggest that poiesis - that which "pro-duces or leads (a thing) into being'" - may enable practitioners in the varying art forms, and aestheticians who reflect upon them, to come to a deeper sense of how artworks work: that they realize themselves inter-dependently of the formative conditions of their inception.” And, “At a philosophical

39 Martin Heidegger was an influential German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being." His best-known book, Being and Time, is considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. Wikipedia40 It is used in philosophy usually to mean outside-of-itself." One's consciousness, for example, is not self-enclosed, one can be conscious of an Other person, who falls well outside of one's own self. Wikipedia41 The Symposium is a philosophical text by Plato dated c. 385–380 BCE. It concerns itself at one level with the genesis, purpose and nature of love. Wikipedia42 Poiesis: The Language of Psychology and the Speech of the Soul, Stephen Levine, Jessica Kingsley, 1997, 141pp43 Complexifying the Poetic, Donna Lynn Trueit, 200544 Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. Wikipedia45 Triadic reciprocal causation is a term introduced by Albert Bandura to refer to the mutual influence between three sets of factors: personal factors (e.g., cognitive, affective and biological events), the environment, and behavior. Wikipedia46 This is a subject that I will write about later in relation to the subject of complexity.47 “Poiesis and Art-Making: A Way of Letting Be”, Derek Whitehead, Contemporary Aesthetics

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level I argue that poiesis may be seen as a liberating force which seeks to engage the multiple conditions of contemporary aesthetic reflection, and at a practical level I argue that the poietic act may be seen in those undercurrents of artistic activity that impel us toward a space of 'unitary multiplicity,' wherein the artist, the artwork, and the receiver of such a work are brought forward in all the features of their self-presentation.”

Whitehead echoes the concept of whooshing up this way, “I have suggested that poiesis will be sensed in those undercurrents of artistic activity that impel us toward a place of 'unitary multiplicity,' wherein the artist, the artwork, and the receiver enact themselves in the full complementarity of their self-abandonment.”

In the early 1990s, Donna Prestwood, Barbara Benjamin and I developed a television series for the National Technological University on leadership in the future, which we titled “Leadership in the Interactive Age”. One of the concepts developed during our research and conversations was the concept of ingenuity48. “Language informs our civilization and civilization, in turn, informs our language. In instances where language and civilization have grown together over the centuries, we can reach down into the roots of our existence by reaching down into the roots of a single word. Ingenuity is such a word. From gn or gen in Indo-European, via Latin, ingenuity denotes our intrinsic ability to know ourselves, become ourselves, and continually recreate our organizations and ourselves. At each juncture of human evolution, it is these characteristics of ingenuity that have fortified our survival and advanced our evolution. “ It seems to me that ingenuity as we defined it is a practical application of poiesis.

Skill, when developed to the craftsman level, assumes an entirely different purpose. “The task of the craftsman”, the authors write “is not to generate the meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill for discerning the meanings that are already there.”

This sounds like Michelangelo as he wrote, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” Nowhere is this more evident than in his ‘unfinished statues’ wherein he demonstrated this concept and used that concept to make the statues of slaves look like they were trying to free themselves from the stone. “The four unfinished slaves reveal eloquently Michelangelo's sculptural process: the figure would be outlined on the front of the marble block and then Michelangelo would work steadily inwards from this one side, in his own words 'liberating the figure imprisoned in the marble'. As the more projecting parts were reached so they were brought to a fairly finished state with those parts further back still only rough-hewn: thus the figures of these slaves literally appear to be struggling to be free. The (unintentional) pathos specifically evoked by the unfinished state of figures such as these and the St. Matthew (Accademia, Florence) exerted a tremendous impact on Rodin who recognized in them expressive possibilities that would be lost in a 'finished' piece.49” “Michelangelo once wrote that a true and pure work of sculpture -- by definition, one that is cut, not cast or modeled -- should retain so much of the original form of the stone block and should so avoid projections and separation of parts that it would roll downhill of its own weight. These words reflect Michelangelo's love of quarried marble and his reverence for the very stone that lies at the heart of his chosen art form of

48 Ingenuity: Humans and their Organizations at the Crossroads, Paul Schumann and Donna Prestwood, Scribd49 The Artchive

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sculpture. Cararra, Italy. Michelangelo's choice of marble block was key to his sculptural process. He spent months in the quarry at Cararra to find the perfect stone for a subject.50”

The authors confirm that we’re talking about ingenuity as they describe the work of a master craftsman in working wood:

For the master of wood, each piece he works with, and therefore more generally each woodworking situation in which he finds himself, is unique. The master's skill for working with wood, therefore, involves intelligence and flexibility rather than rote and automatic response. This does not mean that the master is constantly planning out his actions; his ingenuity is practical, embodied, and in the moment. The master workman will rarely do the same thing twice.

Continuing the analogy of a master wood craftsman described by George Sturt51, Dreyfus and Kelly write:

Sturt’s account establishes a rich and appealing notion of skill. In place of the technical proficiency of an isolated and autonomous individual, Sturt's craftsman exists entirely in relation with his domain. Like any good relationship, each side brings out the other at its best. It is because the craftsman is an intelligent observer of wood and not a ruthless and unintelligent machine, that the wood can reveal to him its subtle virtues. But it is because the wood has these virtues already that the craftsman can cultivate in himself the skill for discerning them and ultimately can come to feel reverence and responsibility for the wood and where it lives. There is, therefore, a kind of feedback loop between craftsman and craft: each jointly cultivates the other into a state of mutual understanding and respect. We have seen the name Aristotle gave to this dual cultivation of craftsman and craft. He called it poiesis.

This idea of skill development and craftsmanship reminded me of the work I did on creativity in the 1980s. I discovered that reaching a level of expert in a skill was an important part of the creativity of an individual. Skill development in adults goes through five stages – novice, advanced beginner, competence, proficiency and expertise. The process begins with left brain dominance and ends with right brain dominance. At the expert level the person just performs appropriate actions. There is no problem solving. And, there is no reasoning52.

50 How Stuff Works51 George Sturt ,who also wrote under the pseudonym George Bourne, was an English writer on rural crafts and affairs. Wikipedia52 Insights into the Creative Process, Paul Schumann, Insights-Foresight

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Skill and expertise play an important role in some practices of zen53, but these are outside the scope of this book.

But poiesis is not enough. The individual has to be able to discern when to allow oneself to be swept up in the physis.

To recognize when it's appropriate to let oneself be swept up and when it's appropriate to walk away is a higher-order skill that is crucial for us in the contemporary world. To acquire this skill, like any skill, requires taking risks as we shall see later. For the moment, however, it is sufficient to note that such a skill allows us to cultivate one prominent form of the sacred available in the culture today. Meta54-poiesis, as one might call it, steers between the twin dangers of the secular age: it resists nihilism by reappropriating the sacred phenomenon of physis, but cultivates the skill to resist physis in its abhorrent, fanatical form. Living well in our secular, nihilistic age, therefore, requires the higher-order skill of recognizing when to rise up as one with the ecstatic crowd and when to turn heel and walk rapidly away.

This brings us back to meta-poiesis. For recall that in addition to the first-order skills for operating within a domain, we moderns must also develop the higher-order, meta-poietic skills for bringing out physis at its best. In addition to the gentle, nurturing skills of the craftsman's sacred domains, our culture also harbors a wild, ecstatic form of the sacred. But we saw that this has a dangerous side. How can we develop the skills to distinguish when it's appropriate to rise up as one with the ecstatic crowd and when it's appropriate to walk away?

But how do we develop this meta-poietic skill? The authors are less than thorough and convincing:

Developing any skill necessarily involves risk. Whether it is the skill of fielding ground balls or making coffee, or the meta-skill of bringing out physis at its best, one does not become a master without taking chances and learning from the consequences of one's mistakes. But our culture calls for a special kind of skill. The hidden history of the West-the history of the ways the practices have gathered to reveal the possibility of sacred, shining things-has bequeathed to us not one form of the sacred, but a variety of different and incompatible types. Physis, poiesis, and technology show us, respectively, a wild, ecstatic sacred that lifts us up like a wave; a gentle, nurturing style that brings things out at their sacred best; and an autonomous and self-sufficient way of life that laughs at everything of sacred worth.

Having taken the risk required in learning, the special, meta-poietic skill called for at this stage of our history, then, is the skill to give each of these sacred modes of gathering its due. The master

53 Zen is a school of Mahāyāna Buddhism. The word Zen is from the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word Chán, which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit word dhyāna, which can be approximately translated as "meditation" or "meditative state". Zen emphasizes experiential Wisdom in the attainment of enlightenment. As such, it de-emphasizes theoretical knowledge in favor of direct self-realization through meditation and dharma practice. The teachings of Zen include various sources of Mahāyāna thought, including the Prajñāpāramitā literature and the teachings of the Yogācāra and Tathāgatagarbha schools. Wikipedia54 Meta is a prefix used in English (and other Greek-owing languages) to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter. Wikipedia

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of living in our poly-sacred world will understand immediately and without reflection that one moment calls for the microwave, while another moment calls for a grateful feast. He will have acquired the skill to let himself be overwhelmed by the ecstatic and wild gods of sport, but the discrimination to keep himself from being drawn in by the rhetoric of the fanatical and dangerous demagogue. He will live a life attuned to the shining things and so will have opened a place to which all the gods may return.

This is an interesting and insightful book. The concepts are potential of great value to the future of mankind. I hope that the authors will return to the subject develop practical ideas about how to develop oneself to live the philosophy they describe.

All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age

Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, Free Press, 2011, 254 pp

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