Ebook Download All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, by Sean Dorrance Kelly
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All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, by Sean Dorrance Kelly
Ebook Download All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, by Sean Dorrance Kelly
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Well on its way to becoming a classic itself, this inspirational book is “a smart, sweeping run through the history of Western philosophy. Important for the way it illuminates life today and for the controversial advice it offers on how to live” (David Brooks, The New York Times).“What constitutes human excellence?” and “What is the best way to live a life?” These are questions that human beings have been asking since the beginning of time. In their critically acclaimed book, All Things Shining, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly argue that our search for meaning was once fulfilled by our responsiveness to forces greater than ourselves, whether one God or many. These forces drew us in and imbued the ordinary moments of life with wonder and gratitude. Dreyfus and Kelly argue in this thought-provoking work that as we began to rely on the power of our own independent will we lost our skill for encountering the sacred. Through their original and transformative discussion of some of the greatest works of Western literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to Melville’s Moby Dick, Dreyfus and Kelly reveal how we have lost our passionate engagement with the things that gave our lives purpose, and show how, by reading our culture’s classics anew, we can once again be drawn into intense involvement with the wonder and beauty of the world. Well on its way to becoming a classic itself, this inspirational book will change the way we understand our culture, our history, our sacred practices, and ourselves.
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Product details
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Free Press; 10.11.2011 edition (August 9, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9781416596165
ISBN-13: 978-1416596165
ASIN: 141659616X
Product Dimensions:
5.5 x 0.7 x 8.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.7 out of 5 stars
85 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#327,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
If you cannot imagine enjoying, of even finding wise counsel, in a book recommending a return to something like polytheism, you are not alone. I have difficulty enough contending with the lingering specter of monotheism: one god, or, more precisely, the loss of any sense of one God, is heartache enough.But something about King Menelaus's admiration for his wife Helen has always intrigued me. At a feast in honor of Telemachus, Odysseus's son, Menelaus listens with rapt appreciation as his wife, Helen, the very Helen of Troy, recounts her passionate embrace of Paris, and her flight to Troy; she left Menelaus and their young child for this most famous of affairs. A decade-long war was fought to get her back. Now she is sitting beside Menelaus later in life recounting those days devoted to her passion? And he sits by admiring?I've read the Odyssey many times, and I have always stubbed my toe on this scene. Shouldn't Menelaus react in rage? And why no shame from Helen? The two of them seem to exult in the memory of this costly betrayal. I have shaken my head at this passage, regarding it is a bizarre prelude to the main event, Odysseus's struggle to return home.All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, opened my eyes. I was using the wrong standard to evaluate Helen's conduct: she swooned for Paris not as an act of betrayal to Menelaus, but because she had responded to Aphrodites's mood, eros. Paris shone, in her eyes, and those eyes were not beclouded with wayward lust, a Christian gloss. She responded to something stirring within and accessible to all, if they would but listen: even in our time we celebrate the sweetest passion. Menelaus was wise enough to know that he too knew the stirring of Aphrodites.Many readers will find this foreign and even chilling. But what can we offer as a counterweight? Dreyfus and Kelly argue that the western tradition has evolved to a point at which we are left, precisely, nowhere: no God, or even gods, populate our heavens. The best among us struggle with a crippling nihilism, dissolving in anger upon selves held out as autonomous, but disconnected from any source of sustaining wonder. David Foster Wallace, a brilliant young writer, killed himself. Why? The authors wonder whether it wasn't because, in the end, living made no sense. When all is equal to all, and choice is a matter simply of will, the glory soon recedes. Yes, Nietszche had syphilis, but didn't he also commit suicide? Perhaps these acts of self-destruction were morally significant after all.All Things Shining is an ambitious little book, a prolegomenon, really, to a much larger project: put simply, it argues that western civilization has spent its moral capital and is bankrupt. The ironist is our new patron saint, but all he can offer is mockery. Life requires engagement in something other than amused detachment, the authors suggest. Scoffing is our new pastime, and we are scoffing all the way to the grave.As I was reading this book, a friend well along life's way, a trial lawyer of some renown, sent me a long note about his struggles for meaning and a sense of identity: he wondered at his seeming inconsistency, and his inability to be but one thing to all the people in his life. He was moved at various times by different impulses: he is a lover, a father, a warrior, a friend, and so much more. Yet beneath these various masks, wasn't there something more real, more fundamental?. I sent him a copy of All Things Shining. Read about Helen and Menelaus, I told him: we are summoned by different forces, different gods, at various points in our lives. We respond, and when that force is spent, we are spent, and await the call of something new. There are times when we are empty, flat keys awaiting expert hands to play upon as and make a melody. I've heard good trial lawyers say they are nothing without a case. Those wrapping themselves in a cocoon of autonomy, the Kantian prison, can never hear these calls; they do not permit their keys to be played upon. They wait in sterile silence.I followed this argument tolerably well from beginning to end, although, I confess, the treatment of Augustine left me indifferent. But I cast my doubts overboard when I boarded the Pequot and went in search of the great whale, as the authors worked their way through Melville's Moby Dick. We used to joke, in the long-since past and almost forgotten days of my youth, that the world historical spirit skipped North American, a play on Hegel. Grand ideas about man and the cosmos never seemed to flourish on this continent, we spat out a few lines on government, and called it quits. I see now it is time to reread Melville. I simply never understood him.Master trial lawyers will read the last chapter of this work with recognition and profit. It is about craftsmanship, and being open to the possibilities of a moment. This one sentence summarizes the work of a trial lawyer: "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." And again, "The master workman will rarely do the same thing twice." Finally, "the project, then, is not to decide what to care about, but to discover what it is about which one already cares." Read what these men have to say about woodworking, or the seemingly mundane act of preparing the morning's coffee, and see whether you don't recognize yourself responding to what is present in a moment. Dare to call it sacred.The call to a renewed polytheism is not so much a plea to reconsider the tedious and metaphysical arguments about the existence of gods or God. These arguments prove everything and nothing at once. It is rather an invitation to heed impulses alive, but rarely acknowledged, within us all. It is a call to rediscover, without shame this time, a sense of the sacred. The gods appear in this work as mere tropes, figures of speech that give us a shared vocabulary, a means of joining hands across the unbridgeable silence separating us from one another. It is a call to being open to what is present: "[O]ur focus on ourselves as isolated, autonomous agents has had the effect of banishing the gods - that is to say, covering up or blocking our sensitivity to what is sacred in the world. The gods are calling us but we have ceased to listen." Amen, I want incongruously to say.This is a profound pamphlet of a book, all the more promising and evocative as one of the co-authors, Sean Dorrance Kelly, is chairman of the Harvard University Department of Philosophy. It appears as the academy is not yet dead.. Yet the courage to shed irony and confront the divine in our midst is a call the authors cannot pull off without a certain bit of silliness. At the very end of the book, they write the following: "The gods have not withdrawn or abandoned us, we have kicked them out. They are waiting plaintively for us to hear their call." These words are noble, and they fell upon my parched heart like the promises of a lover. Why, I wonder, did the authors need to follow them with the following line? "Ask not why the gods have abandoned you, but why you have abandoned the gods." This parody of Kennedy rings like an untuned key, jangling, and making me wonder whether the authors are serious after all.When major institutions falter and do not address the stirring of individual hearts, when grand ideas are silent in the face of a sense of the sacred open and available to all, then the wheel of time spins, and new forms of life, new ways of being, emerge. I can hear the craftsman's wheel spinning now within myself; I see it in the world around me. Is it Chaos calling? Or is it, just maybe, a sense of the divine demanding its due?
What is meaning? What makes something meaningful? The questions of whether it was god or the gods or anything outside of ourselves or whether we create all the meaning there is, is taken on in a clear well written and documented tale. How does one live a meaningful life in this secular age? I doubt if anyone who has not already pondered these questions will read All Things Shining. And there's the rub. Getting lifted up by the speeches of Martin Luther King or Lou Gehrig clearly illustrates how "we" can get caught up in something that is not something that any individual created, caused or willed. My concern is directed more to the average-every-day "Joe" as he goes through his life. Does he have to wait for the next wave to lift him up only to have it pass away leaving a void until the next magic moment occurs? The last chapter summarized, for me, what we face in this modern era. For me it is summed up with "it ain't what you do; it's how you do it." I look at my own life as it progresses and those around me who are fully involved in arenas that matter to them even though I would doubt they would even say it that way. They live what being-in-world points to and they are, for me, a living example of what it means to care. I don't have to have read Dante's Inferno or Moby Dick to appreciate not only what they are doing but how they do it, As I watch them I am inspired by how they take life on in their average everydayness. They are a shining example of what it means to be a human being.
At the 50,000 foot level Sartre is right in that the question we all need to ask is--why not suicide. Yet life isn't lived at the 50,000 foot level; it's lived on the ground, in the trenches, day-to-day, minute-to-minute. The philosophy of the cancer ward is to take it one day at a time and enjoy. We may not all be looking death in the face, but from the 50,000 foot level we actually are, for a life time is only a flicker of a moment in the greater scheme of things. All Things Shining (ATS) is trying to help us focus on the here and now and find things that shine--the rituals, the celebrations, the skills, etc., which bring joy to our day-to-day lives. What's important about the ATS approach is that it avoids what I consider to be the error of existentialism, which is the belief that we can achieve meaning in life through rational effort alone. Rather, our reach for meaning has to start at the level of emotions, which are at the pre-rational--the symbolic, the ritualistic; the dramaturgical--for emotions serve as the foundation for our rationality. The focus of ATS is on that pre-rational. We can't retrieve the pre-rational beliefs of the Greeks—their gods, their rituals—but they can serve as a didactic that helps us look for relevant analogies in the present; analogies that are right in front of us, but we don't see because we don't know how to look. ATS has helped me to make more of life’s little rituals--e.g. brewing a good cup of coffee, achieving a close and satisfying shave, watching an art or athletic performance--and attempt to extract more joy from the little celebrations of existence--e.g. holiday gift giving or achieving a small advance at work.In retrospect, I think ATS helps to delineate I am too much of a Stoic. The Stoic isn't the happy person in the concentration camp; rather, he is the joyless person at the birthday party, the wedding and the concentration camp. He is the guy, who volunteers to go to the front of the shower line. Stoicism may help me get through the hard times, but it leaves me joyless in the day-to-day. ATS has helped me to look more closely at the little rituals of the day-to-day--e.g. making coffee, shaving--and at life's little celebrations-e.g. Valentines day, a small advance in my work--and try to make the most of them.In retrospect, I think ATS helps to delineate I am too much of a Stoic. The Stoic isn't the happy person in the concentration camp; rather, he is the joyless person at the birthday party, the wedding and the concentration camp. He is the guy, who volunteers to go to the front of the shower line. Stoicism may help me get through the hard times, but it leaves me joyless in the day-to-day. ATS has helped me to look more closely at the little rituals of the day-to-day--e.g. making coffee, shaving--and at life's little celebrations-e.g. Valentines day, a small advance in my work--and try to make the most of them.
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