All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular World by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly (review)

Rarely have I encountered a book like All Things Shining. It bravely engages issues that are truly significant for our time, yet flaws run through it like faults in the California landscape. The book has spawned contentious critique unusual for a work by contemporary philosophers. Before I offer my own critical analysis, it is fitting first to appreciate what Dreyfus and Kelly attempt to achieve.

The foremost contemporary problems the authors combat are what they term "the burden of choice" and a pervasive mood of nihilistic confusion. They believe the rationalistic and existential programs that are typically advocated in our secular age fail to offer persons convincing grounds for making sustainable decisions. Some persons attempt to avoid sensitivity in decision making through adopting an arrogant program of grasping for more and more power; others retreat to obsessions, infatuations, or addictions (5-8). Neither approach leads to meaningful fulfillment in life. Although they do not express their intention in quite these terms (cf. 88-89), the authors can be seen as attempting to re-enchant Weber's disenchanted modern world so that decision making is grounded in sacred, shining things.

I applaud Dreyfus and Kelly for casting aside the academic security provided by specialization in philosophical minutia. Painting with a broad brush, they diagnose how significant works in the course of Western culture interpret meaning in life. In addressing their work to a nonspecialist audience, they open themselves to the criticism of the specialist in the many fields they include in their sweeping analysis. But their concern with charting meaning in life is exactly the sort of risky enterprise that philosophers should be undertaking. Kudos to them for their attempt. Alas, I suspect even the nonspecialist will find multiple problems with what they deliver.

Chapter 3, on Homer's polytheistic worldview, lays the framework for Dreyfus and Kelly's solution to their perception of dysfunction in Western civilization: "Rather than understanding themselves in terms of inner experiences and beliefs, the Homeric Greeks saw themselves as beings swept up into public and shareable moods. For Homer, moods are important because they illuminate a shared situation: they manifest what matters most in the moment and in doing so draw people to perform heroic and passionate deeds. The gods are crucial to setting these moods, and different gods illuminate different, and even incompatible, ways a situation can matter"(60). Dreyfus and Kelly affirm the Homeric worldview because they believe that meaning is best understood to be contextual in nature. Public moods are said to capture this contextual meaningfulness with a power lacking in individual decision making. To live well is to attune oneself to that which is given in specific situations.

Some of the illustrations offered undermine the claim that the moods valued by the authors are public, shared, and intrinsically worthwhile. They begin chapter 3 affirming Homer's positive treatment of Helen: "The goddess to whom Helen was most attuned was Aphrodite; she illuminates a situation's erotic possibilities and draws one to bring these out at their best" (60). But is erotic attraction a public, sharable mood? Isn't there something decidedly individualistic about who is attracted to whom? Considering the suffering and death caused by Helen's liaison with Paris, does it make sense to view Helen's uncritical response to Aphrodite's mood as a cultural ideal to be admired, as the authors repeatedly advocate (cf. 62, 83-84, 85-87, 123, 141, 219)? Do we in fact act our best if we open ourselves to the moods and lures of the environing things and events we encounter (see 142)? Isn't a life attuned only to how we are drawn from without liable to be as chaotic and inconsistent as external circumstances tend to be? Should a life structured by "a calculus of plans and principles" be so easily jettisoned as...