In 2008 I was feeling lost in a philosophical Slough of Despond, alienated from academic philosophy, having come to describe myself as an « ex-philosopher ».
Then one day I came across by chance Hubert Dreyfus’s podcasts on Heidegger’s BEING AND TIME, on Existentialism in Film and Literature, and on Man, God, and Society in Western Literature (also called « From gods to God and back »). I was inspired by listening to them to begin reading and thinking about philosophy seriously again.
In particular I admired Dreyfus’s lecture series: « From gods to God and back » , tracing the history of pluralism ranging from Homer’s polytheism, through its onto-theological abandonment in Dante and Descartes, to its return in Herman Melville’s novels. Further, what excited me was that this was an ongoing project, evolving towards new ideas and new works.
I was enthusiastic and wanted to participate. One consequence of my involvement is that I started this blog as a defence, explanation, and free-ranging discussion of the pluralism expounded by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly in their theoretical project, in their book ALL THINGS SHINING, (published in 2011), and in their podcasted lectures and seminars leading up to and following that publication.
Another advantage of this project is that Dreyfus and Kelly managed to crystallise a wide community of conversation around their work of ideas, embodying that discussion in the blog ALL THINGS SHINING. Suddenly philosophy had become anew (in my case) a living collective practice, and not just solitary reading and meditation.
Initially I was enthusiastic, but my thinking slowly evolved and I came to the conclusion that their research programme, while having many merits, was not fully pluralist, that it could go further.
In spite of their manifest attempts to think outside the dominant paradigms, Dreyfus and Kelly’s thought, though conceptually innovative, was often restrained within the limits of intellectually conservative conclusions. Pluralist thinkers with « wilder » conclusions, such as Paul Feyerabend, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres, and James Hillman, were passed over in silence, despite the presence in their work of substantial resemblances in theme, references, and arguments to those of ALL THINGS SHINING.
I wrote a review explaining why I think the book is important and interesting, and that it has been unjustly neglected. I also discuss its intellectual and stylistic flaws, not from the outside but from the point of view of someone sympathetic to their project and wanting to take their epistemological, psychological, and ontological pluralism even further.
I think ALL THINGS SHINING is essential reading, for anyone interested in philosophy– not just as a set of theoretical possibilities, but as something that can enrich your life.
The review is still very much a draft, and I would like to correct, rewrite, and expand it, so all comments are welcome.
It is available on Scribd:
It is also available on my academia.edu page: https://www.academia.edu/1887165/Review_of_Dreyfus_and_Kelly_ALL_THINGS_SHINING.
And also on this blog: On ALL THINGS SHINING.
AGENT SWARM 
I am glad you were re-inspired. 👍🏾.
I’ll have to look into Dryfus.
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I thought you’d like to know that I followed with interest your recent discussion with Sean Kelly, which led me to read ‘All Things Shining’, which led me to read your full review of the book.
As someone who doesn’t relate well with history (that’s the best I can put it), I found the book very useful. I can sense how the narrative is a little bit too neat, but it did help me to make sense of the different epochal understandings in relation to each other. I sometimes read books of which I get just one fifth (and that’s OK: it’s « the job of a lifetime » too), but I must admit: it has been nice reading a philosophy book that is so accesible to non philosophers, both in style and vocabulary, and that doesn’t force me to make ten Google searches per page! I especially enjoyed the central part – from Homer to ‘Moby Dick’ – and, despite some occasional hesitations, I mostly went with the whooshing (if I can say it like this). I take your point on nostalgia, though. I’m not nostalgic at all, but lately I’ve found myself (by contagion, I’m sure) speaking in those terms almost as if I knew or remembered how it was before. So it’s good to be reminded of the dangers of equating whatever discontent one may feel about the present with the idea that everything was so much better, so much full, and so much meaningful before.
I like the world-image of things shining that the book evokes. And I understand these shinings to be the very fullness of things (sublimated, as it were). I also like the idea of meta-poiesis as a skill that can allow us to open up to these shining things via increased attentiveness and care, and therefore experience them as meaningful/sacred. But, that said, don’t these things shine a little bit too much in the same way? I agree with what you comment about the importance of « pathological » or « negative » intensities because those can be, too, profoundly de-centering and revelatory. I missed this in ‘All Things Shining’: an acknowledgement that these states can be full of meaning (even if they arise from senselessness and lostness, but that’s a different thing); that they are not closed-off to the sacred; and that they are (in many cases, I think) related to the outside world as well. All these moods veering towards the low/dark side of the spectrum constitute a huge part of daily life (at least, of mine). What does one do with those? I feel that, in the book, they are reduced to some kind of defeat or failure, and always (as you point out) invariably associated with the ego. I simply don’t think this is the case. Depression, sadness … they also shine and make things shine in their own ways. They are not just cautionary tales or symptoms of a nihilistic age. Nor are they *only* the necessary passages for the moments of grace.
I found the over-emphasis on crowds, celebrity figures, and extraordinary physical achievements a bit suspicious (for lack of a better word). This, in part, may be a personal bias of mine, but I think there’s more. You talk about a metaphysical split in the examples they choose and I felt this very strongly in the last chapter. It is as if, once we are in the terrain of sports, all becomes automatically sacred; as if will, autonomy, individuality, control – all issues that have been crucial in the rest of the book, especially when discussing contemporary writers – did not need to be considered when adressing elite sport players and highly competitive environments. There’s something here that does not work for me … Besides, if sports play such an important role in American (and non-American!) life, as Dreyfus and Kelly themselves note, I wonder: are those the most appropiate examples? Isn’t this particular experience of the sacred already felt and understood in these very terms by the people involved in it? And haven’t we had already enough of it?! (This is a joke, but I mean it.)
Cinema has its own version of this too – the communal experience with two hundred people in the dark theater (=sacred) versus the individual experience in front of your TV (=desecrated) – and I’ve never been entirely convinced by this division. Perhaps certain settings and situations are more propicious to attune people to the sacred, but perhaps this very idea just gets in the way, brackets the experience in advance, and renders it stereotyped. In my view, what is needed is to highlight other kind of practices with different configurations and factors at play. In Sean’s post on ‘How Do You Make a Decission?’, for instance, there’s a temporal dimension, there’s time in-between the accident and the decission. Today, when there’s such an obsession with speed and instantaneity, these kind of delayed/gradual/over time encounters with the sacred are worth paying attention too.
Finally, I love everything you say about the chapter on David Foster Wallace. I haven’t read his novels. But I have read (how could I not? It is a very compelling call you make!) the ‘This Is Water’ speech. I found this text incredibly powerful, and affecting, and humbling. I was very moved by it and by your discussion of it. And I though the way Wallace plays with the conventions of these type of suck-up-to-the-institution speeches, and the way he extracts truths from all those clichés, was another wonderful example of how one can discern/make emerge « the meanings that are already there ».
I could go on but I’ll stop here because, really, I just wanted to express my (non-theistic, always) gratitude. Your review (and the more recent discussion) enriched greatly my reading of the book. Needless to say, I wouldn’t have been thinking in all these things if it weren’t for it. I apologise for the excessive length of this comment, but (in the now immortal words of Vincent in ‘Pulp Fiction’): « This shit happens » …
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Hello Cristina, thank you for your thoughtful reaction to the book ALL THINGS SHINING and to my review of it. If you liked the book you may like the podcast lectures by Dreyfus: https://archive.org/details/Philosophy_6_Spring_2007_UC_Berkeley, and by Kelly: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~sdkelly/SDK-4-PHI292.html. They often contain interesting ideas that do not make it into the book. You are right that the book makes us think through its historical perspective and through its choice of works. I really appreciated the sketch of an analysis of MOBY DICK as pluralist, polytheist work, and I would have liked more on that. The book also makes us think because of its flaws and one-sidedness. I like your example of the one-sided denigration of TV compared to movie theatres, especially as films have been becoming more formulaic and derivative, while TV has become more experimental and more visionary. Finally, everything has a shadow side, tied to our inferiorities, and the book’s obsession with superior performance disturbs me. I wish Dreyfus and Kelly had written their sequel, THE LOFTY SWAY OF THE DARK, because perhaps that would have led them to change their minds a little. We know that the true hero of STAR WARS is Anakin Skywalker/Darth Veda, not goody-goody Luke, as he was the one who balanced the two sides of the Force.
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Thanks, Terence. I’ll definitely listen to these lectures. The chapter on ‘Moby Dick’ was, in fact, my favourite. I did read the novel only a few years ago, intrigued by the discussion on Anglo-American literature in Deleuze’s and Parnet’s ‘Dialogues’ (you see, all roads converge in your review!). I like what Dreyfus and Kelly propose in this chapter and also how they develop it, departing from those cryptic declarations by Melville and arriving to the whole idea of polytheism. Everything they have to say about the whale and Achab is interesting, but I appreciated too that they pick up on Ishmael to relate this polytheism to the idea of openess to moods.
The TV/cinema issue is complex because there are a lot of differences, too, in the ways films and series are produced. I do think there are wonderful things happening in cinema but they pass under the radar or just don’t get proper commercial releases. However, I agree that the more mainstream/popular strand of films is not very adventurous right now. In TV, screenwriters have more weight and more power. Directors often complain that they have very little freedom in TV and that their creative work is somehow limited by the visual parameters set in advance (and I think this often shows in the moment-to-moment development, at the level of how the scenes are « designed » following a limited set of visual choices). But, on the other hand, TV is definitely trying harder to grasp the present moment and it is much more open to recent developments and changes happening in all areas.
I’m a bit ashamed to confess this but I have never seen ‘Star Wars’ (a lot of resistance to this saga here in my household!). But I’ve heard/read so much about it that I do get you reference 🙂 I’ll catch up, one day, with the nine of them!
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