Book Analysis: All Things Shining
All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly meditates on the question on how to find meaning in a secular age. In modern times, religion has taken a backseat and we instead depend on reason and willing to ascribe meaning onto our projects. However, willing meaning into the world has proven difficult. One who wills meaning into the world one day can unwill it the next day. This uncertainty and lack of durability has led to the destruction of a stable meaningfulness in the world. This book attempts to reestablish the meaning by looking back to previous literary epochs (including Homer, Augustine, and Dante) to better understand how we might reconstitute meaning in our secular age.
Homer and the Ancient Greeks occupied a very different world than that which we inhabit today. Individual willing was nonexistent; to will was to act against the Olympian Gods. Instead, every occurrence in the world was given over by the Gods. And no occurrence was ever reduced to “good” or “bad.” Instead, each God represented a mood or excellence that was sacred in itself. For example, when Helen runs away with Paris in the Iliad, she is not acting “badly”, but instead she is receptive to the goddess Aphrodite. The response would be of reverence and awe of the act that conforms with Aphrodite rather than an individual betrayal. Thus, Homer revealed a world that attained meaning through a pluralistic divine. Meaning was not attained by individual willing, but given over by being receptive to the Gods.
Ancient Greek playwright, Aeschylus, marks the end of the plural character of the Gods. Instead, Aeschylus’s Gods reduce all behavior down to justice. What is good is what is just. In the Oresteia, King Agamemnon is murdered by his queen because he sacrificed his daughter. The question is whether it is just to kill the queen for committing regicide. Orestes kills the queen (his mother) in the name of Apollo, however his act calls for his own killing. The incessant murdering can only be stopped by the establishment of the Greek polis, where rhetoric and reason argue over what is just and therefore what is good. In the epoch of Homer, each action was good insofar as it conformed with the Gods. However, this new epoch marks a time where it is good only insofar as it is “just”. Thus all Gods are measured according to a single criterion, and a monotheism starts to develop.
Ancient Greece however, still lacks individual willing. All acts are framed within the eyes of the Gods. The transfer of authority to the individual begins with Jesus. Jesus reinterpreted morality as from something you do, to something that you desire. Before, wrongness was only applied to action. Jesus shifts morality such that it is wrong to desire a wrong action. Thus, simply by desiring, you commit sin. This reinterpretation of morality moved agency into the individual because it demands for the control over one’s own desires. However, over time, the church objectified Christianity into an external faith. It wasn’t until Martin Luther that Christianity was again re-centered in the individual. In Luther’s time, the Enlightenment was gaining momentum. It argued for the freedom of man’s servitude through his own power for reason and understanding. The Enlightenment combined with Luther’s emphasis to bring Christianity back into the individual shifted responsibility of morality back to the individual. It was no longer an external entity (like God or the Church) that determined justice, but instead it was the self. Luther argued that one has individual freedom, however, the faculties one uses to attain that freedom are given by Jesus. Thus, it was still not individual willing that established meaning, but the givenness of Jesus through the individual.
However, in the late 19th century, with Nietzsche’s statement “God is Dead”, the authority of religion declined and moral responsibility shifted entirely to the individual. What is “good” and “right” must be determined by the individual. In Melville’s Moby Dick, the individual willing is exemplified in Captain Ahab, who devotes his entire life to the pursuit of a whale. For him, the whale is the answer to the universe. It is the ultimate meaning of his existence. In a sense, the whale has displaced the Gods for Ahab, and his life is meaningful only insofar as the whale continues to swim in the sea. Ahab’s powerful willing is contrasted with Pip’s revelation. Pip, a small sailor, is thrown overboard by a wave and watches as the ship sails away. He has an existential breakdown and discovers that the world is meaningless. He realizes that it is only meaningful if we give it meaning. When the ship returns to pick him up, he has ultimately changed. He appears to others as crazed. He has grown eyes to understand that Ahab’s quest for the whale is meaningless; it all comes down to perspective. Pip becomes crazy. Melville’s Moby Dick thus presents us with a choice if we assume individual willingness as a mechanism for attaining meaning: go crazy like Pip, or struggle eternally like Ahab.
All Things Shining thus argues that our dependence on individual willing to attain meaning is flawed. It proposes instead a new way of being in the world, in which we become receptive a world that is already meaningful.
“The task of the craftsman is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill for discerning the meanings that are already there.”
The world is already laden with meaning. It is not our job to create meaning, but to gain skills that open the world up to us in new ways such that we can access the meaning that is already there. Even small rituals, like drinking coffee in the morning, are pregnant with meaning. We drink out of a mug and not a Styrofoam cup because the mug presents itself to us in a way that is more aligned with our sensibilities. When we go to the ballpark to watch a game, we clap and cheer with others in a shared, communal appreciation for the game. An external pressure impassions us to clap. Our enlightenment selves tell us to retain control and not let external influences change our behavior, but we have already gone down that path and it leads to nihilism. We shouldn’t necessarily discard reason, but instead, we need to balance it with being more receptive to the world.
At the same time, we must be cautious about what attempts to influence us. Cheering at a baseball game is one thing. Cheering at a Nazi Rally is another. In addition to being open to the world, we must, like a craftsman, understand what presents itself to us and act appropriately. This is a skill in itself. To conclude, meaning is not sought, but received through ways of being in the world. Only by sharpening our skills that opens the world to us will news ways to receive the meaning become accessible to us. But we also must be cautious in what we receive. Meaningfulness does not imply good. And thus we must also build a receptivity for morality.
