All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus (PDF)

Description

An unrelenting flow of choices confronts us at nearly every moment of our lives, and yet our culture offers us no clear way to choose. This predicament seems inevitable, but in fact it’s quite new. In medieval Europe, God’s calling was a grounding force. In ancient Greece, a whole pantheon of shining gods stood ready to draw an appropriate action out of you. Like an athlete in “the zone,” you were called to a harmonious attunement with the world, so absorbed in it that you couldn’t make a “wrong” choice. If our culture no longer takes for granted a belief in God, can we nevertheless get in touch with the Homeric moods of wonder and gratitude, and be guided by the meanings they reveal? All Things Shining says we can. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly illuminate some of the greatest works of the West to reveal how we have lost our passionate engagement with and responsiveness to the world. Their journey takes us from the wonder and openness of Homer’s polytheism to the monotheism of Dante; from the autonomy of Kant to the multiple worlds of Melville; and, finally, to the spiritual difficulties evoked by modern authors such as David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Gilbert. Dreyfus, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, for forty years, is an original thinker who finds in the classic texts of our culture a new relevance for people’s everyday lives. His lively, thought-provoking lectures have earned him a podcast audience that often reaches the iTunesU Top 40. Kelly, chair of the philosophy department at Harvard University, is an eloquent new voice whose sensitivity to the sadness of the culture–and to what remains of the wonder and gratitude that could chase it away–captures a generation adrift.Re-envisioning modern spiritual life through their examination of literature, philosophy, and religious testimony, Dreyfus and Kelly unearth ancient sources of meaning, and teach us how to rediscover the sacred, shining things that surround us every day. This book will change the way we understand our culture, our history, our sacred practices, and ourselves. It offers a new–and very old–way to celebrate and be grateful for our existence in the modern world.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From Booklist Many people in today’s world do not recognize “shining” things when they see them. Instead, feelings of loss, sadness, angst, and despair prevail. Dreyfus and Kelly lament that fact and respond to the situation by introducing (or reintroducing) readers to several literary classics of the Western world. With a balanced mix of philosophy and literature, the authors highlight works like Melville’s Moby Dick, Homer’s Odyssey, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. The organizing principle is mostly thematic, with chapters dealing with nihilism, polytheism, monotheism, and autonomy. The work is not religious in the traditional sense. Jesus and Christianity are brought into the discussion only occasionally as conversation partners, and the target audience includes people who would rather listen to Immanuel Kant than the Apostle Paul. Throughout, the tone is only barely academic. The authors assume their readers have no prior knowledge of the works they discuss. The conclusion is hopeful—that one can live a life worth living in a secular age. It starts with recognizing “shining” things when we encounter them. This book is proof that some of the Western classics can help us do just that. –Wade Osburn Review “Occasionally brave philosophers do leap out of their professional lanes and illuminate things for the wider public. Hubert Dreyfus of Berkeley and Sean Dorrance Kelly of Harvard have just done this with their new book, “All Things Shining.” They take a smart, sweeping run through the history of Western philosophy. But their book is important for the way it illuminates life today and for the controversial advice it offers on how to live. A rejection of the excessive individualism of the past several decades, the emphasis on maximum spiritual freedom. In this, it’s a harbinger of future philosophies to come.”–David Brooks, The New York Times”Fascinating. Even if you don’t agree that we are caught in an age of nihilistic indecision, if you attune yourself to the authors’ energetic intelligence and deep engagement with key texts in the West, you will have much to be grateful for.”– Michael Roth, The New York Times”An inspirational book but a highly intelligent and impassioned one. The authors set out to analyze our contemporary nihilism the better to remedy it. “All Things Shining” provides a concise history of Western thought, beginning with Homer and concluding with Descartes and Kant. But there are extended discussions as well of such contemporary authors as the late David Foster Wallace and, even more startling, of “chick lit” novelist Elizabeth Gilbert.The authors’ general theme, and lament, is that we are no longer “open to the world.” We fall prey either to “manufactured confidence” that sweeps aside all obstacles or to a kind of addictive passivity, typified by “blogs and social networking sites.” Both are equally unperceptive. What makes their case finally compelling is their insistence on the importance of openness, on attentiveness to the given moment, on what they call “a fully embodied, this-worldly kind of sacred.” If, as they claim, “the story of how we lost touch with these sacred practices is the hidden history of the West,” they have offered some small but shining hints on how we might hope to recover them.” –Eric Ormsby, The Wall Street Journal”Fascinating insights about the search for meaning in our time, and the threat of nihilism. All Things Shining raises fundamental questions about the religious and ethical developments of humanity since the Axial Age. This book tackles big issues, ones that really matter in our lives today.” –Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age“In All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, two distinguished philosophers, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, have written an extraordinary, ambitious, and provocative tour de force that frames one of the central questions of our age: how we have passed “from the intense and meaningful lives of Homer’s world to the indecision and sadness” that too often characterizes modern times. This is compelling reading because in examining the great literary works produced in the history of the West, the authors find new ways of configuring issues of choice, autonomy, fanaticism, solace, and most importantly, the ties that bind us to the past. The book is both brief and yet remarkably comprehensive as it delves into the transcendent values of the classic works that have helped to advance modern thought and inform the development of the Western world. I found myself particularly fascinated by Chapter 5, ‘The Attractions and Dangers of Autonomy.’ As with the rest of the book, reading this chapter, I could hardly put it down” —Vartan Gregorian, President, Carnegie Corporation of New York”Dreyfus and Kelly would initiate us into a this-worldly piety of wonder and gratitude; of attunement to moments when something transcendentally excellent shines forth in the mundane. The new age that Dreyfus and Kelly hope for is a polytheistic and basically aristocratic corrective to the leveling of modern culture, which they attribute to the mindsets of monotheism and technology. You will be arrested by their reading of the tradition, and of our current situation. If you find yourself high-fiving strangers when Tom Brady connects with Randy Moss in the end zone from downtown, or would like to, this book is for you. ” -Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft“There is a world out there that is as concealed as it is crucial to the good life. Dreyfus and Kelly have lifted the veil with pedagogical skill and striking insights. It’s a world of things shining that can lend grace and depth to our lives. The book is itself a shining thing.” —Albert Borgmann, author of Real American Ethics “Stunning! This is one of the most surprising, demanding, and beautiful books I have ever read. My compliments gentleman, and I hope thousands of others share my admiration—and awe.” –Charles Van Doren, author of A History of Knowledge About the Author Hubert Dreyfus is a leading interpreter of existential philosophy. He has taught at UC Berkeley for more than 40 years.Sean Dorrance Kelly is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is also Co-Chair of Harvard’s interdisciplinary committee for the study of Mind, Brain, and Behavior. Before arriving at Harvard, Kelly taught at Stanford and Princeton, and he was a Visiting Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He is considered a leading interpreter of the French and German tradition in phenomenology, as well as a prominent philosopher of mind. Kelly has published articles in numerous journals and anthologies and has received fellowships or awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the NSF and the James S. McDonnell Foundation, among others. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. A NOTE TO THE READER THE WORLD DOESN’T MATTER to us the way it used to. The intense and meaningful lives of Homer’s 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 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. © 2011 Hubert Dreyfus Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐”All Things Shining” is a book written by two philosophers, for a general audience. While there is textual analysis and criticism, it is in service of a goal that the authors feel should have very broad appeal in our secular and nihilistic 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. [. . .] 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 sadnes 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 authors goal, in short, is to clear a path by which people can lure back the “merry May-day gods of old”–the sacred shining things–in order that they may thereby lead intense and meaningful lives, as the ancient Greeks once did. However, they are not interested in trying to recover anything supernatural; they are not, for example, interested in bringing back belief in a literally existing, supernatural Greek Goddess named “Aphrodite”. They are instead interested in something that might be called a mood, or an attunement, that opens one to the world, and to a sacred dimension that once may have been understood as, and represented by a god or goddess: the erotic dimension and that which attunes one to it, being that which was once called “Aphrodite”; the aggressive, war-like dimension “Ares”; and so on.The authors look back to Homer’s polytheism (among other worlds) and the inner attitudes that it engendered because they believe that people now have a “gut-level sadness” and lead flattened down and meaningless lives. Our age is one that is threatened by nihilism. Indeed, our very lives are threatened:”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.”And the more sensitive ones among us–like canaries in a coal mine–have already born witness to the great danger of nihilism. Chapter 1 and 2 of the book are called, respectively, “Our Contemporary Nihilism” and “David Foster Wallace’s Nihilism.” David Foster Wallace (who battled with depression all his life and who finally took his own life) was very interested in finding out what was still alive and viable in our age so that he could “apply CPR” to it. He viewed this as the mission of an author–or at least as his mission. His tried to overcome the problem of despair and the wasteland of a “consumer hell” by offering the possibility that we can attribute meanings to things by force of intellectual will. You can chose how you will take things, he says. The lady in front of you yelling at her kid in the checkout line might have been up all night holding the hand of her husband who is undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer, for example. She might have. You can’t say for sure she wasn’t. The mind is its own place, and can make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell, in other words. Wallace, however, failed to achieve this, and felt that he wouldn’t ever achieve it. The authors point out that that is because such a thing is impossible. You can’t just attribute any arbitrary meanings to things ex nihilo, like God, because you are a human, not a god.So, what to do? How to proceed? How to find a way to make sense of the world and our place in it and to find meaningful differences between the overwhelming number of choices we all face every day? In what the authors feel may seem a surprising turnabout to readers, they ask the question how we declined from the wonder and glory of Greece to our sorry state in the modern world. The next four chapters of the book offer snapshots of various stages of that decline. We start with “Homer’s Polytheism” and a discussion of The Odyssey in chapter 3, and move to Aeschylus and Augustine in chapter 4, Dante and Kant in chapter 5, and to Melville in Chapter 6.In the world described by Homer–in the world originated by Homer–we find men and women who are open to being “swept up” by one or more of the divinities. When one of these attuning ones acted upon (and with) a Greek man or woman, they embraced the wave and rose up with the great swell, being carried forward into action. But, this phenomenon was neither active, autonomous, self-directed action, nor something totally passive and receptive about which one had no choice. In a wonderful endnote the authors mention the existence of the “middle voice” in Attic Greek which is something in between the passive and active voice. In our modern grammar we have the active–“John threw the ball”–and we have the passive–“John was thrown by the bull”–but we don’t have that middle voice whereby your action is called out of you by the situation and the surroundings–by an attunement, or by something that attunes you to important realities inherent in your surroundings. Homer uses the middle voice, we are told, when Athena prompted Odysseus’s hands to reach out and grab a passing rock and thus save himself from being smashed into the rocky shore. Odysseus was neither totally active, nor totally passive.According to the authors, this is in fact how most modern day “heroes” describe their heroic acts. It wasn’t that they intellectually decided to do such and such a heroic act, they tell us, it was that they just saw the situation and acted: “I just saw someone who needed help. Anyone would have done the same thing.” Indeed, many people may have also seen someone who needed help, and yet they didn’t do anything, caught up in their own thoughts and in the possibilities, still caught up in the Enlightenment mode of being an autonomous individual. “Heroes”, however, can often be said not to experience themselves as the source of their actions. In Homer’s world, a hero would have said, like Odysseus, that it was “Athena’s work.” (or the work of some other divinity). Today, we do not have this option. Dreyfus and Kelly would like to lay the theoretical and philosophical ground-work that will give us all this option back. Like the Buddha, they offer a “middle way” between two evils.The final chapter, “Conclusion: Lives Worth Living in a Secular Age” deals directly with this topic, having had the way prepared for it by the previous chapters. Dreyfus and Kelly would like us to feel gratitude towards the world. They feel that this is the best response even to situations that most of us would just view as lucky–the roll of the impartial dice. They discuss both a scene in The Odyssey where six spears thrown at point black range all fail to find their mark in Odysseus, and a similar scene in Pulp Fiction where six bullets shot from a handgun all miss Jules and Vincent. Jules insists that it is a miracle from God, whereas Vincent just says that sometimes stuff just happens. While the authors don’t believe–and don’t want us to believe–that a supernatural being caused the bullets to miss somehow or other, they still insist that one should feel grateful and cared for in such an event. The trick to leading an intense and meaningful life, they tell us, is to be open to being swept up by such moods. Helen of Troy, despite causing the Trojan War and leaving her husband to run of with Paris, was acting with “arete”, with excellence, by being responsive to Aphrodite’s call. Later, the wave passed and the mood subsided and she returned to her husband, and was responsive to Hera’s call, to the domestic dimension in life, without feeling the need to rank, reconcile, or compare the two dimensions or moralize her actions. THIS is what POLYTHEISM truly means. It means that there is no overarching mono-logic consideration that can rank and adjudicate the gods and goddess and the realities, the domains, over which they preside. To decline from this to monotheism is to narrow the range and wonder of human life from its multi-dimensional richness in Homor, to the nothingness of a line, a single dimension, in the modern world.The authors immediately raise the problem of Hitler, of course. The people at Hitler’s rallies were definitely open and responsive to being swept-up by the wave, so to speak! How can one embrace a meaningful life if the danger of the Holocaust or war or lynchings or similar things is the consequence? The authors’ solution to this problem is something they call “meta-poiesis” and they develop it from considering a craftperson, such as a wheelwright. Meta-poiesis allows one to learn the craft of living and to know when to give in and become responsive, and when to walk away. In addition, people must discover what they like and turn these things into rituals. Perhaps the morning cup of coffee becomes a ritual, because one discovers that it is more than just a caffeine delivery system, or perhaps it is something else. Not everything will shine, but all the shining things will shine.OK. That’s the recap. Now to my commentary. First of all, the notion that the modern age is suffering from loss of meaning and nihilism is pretty much inaccurate, in my opinion. Most people are OK. Plenty of people do lead intense and meaningful lives. Further, there were plenty of people in Ancient Greece who probably were not leading the intense and meaningful lives Dreyfus and Kelly so admire in Homer’s characters–like, for example, say, maybe the SLAVES.Second, one cannot, ex nihilo, cause oneself to feel grateful just by deciding intellectually that it’s the best emotion to feel! If you did know that “God” had caused the bullets fired at you to miss, then, yes, you would naturally feel gratitude. But if, on the contrary, all that you know points to this being an impossibility, then trying to conjure up a feeling of gratitude is a fools errand.Third, HADES IS ALSO A GOD! Depression and sadness and despair and angst are ALSO sacred dimensions of human life in a true polytheistic world. People chase after happiness and run from sadness, but ALL of our emotions are vital and important. They all are trying to tell us something. They all carry energy and information from one part of the psyche to another. What Dreyfus and Kelly are really trying to revivify and lure back here are THE EMOTIONS. If you really want to lead an intense and meaningful life, welcome all of your emotions, even the negative ones, the bad ones. (Which doesn’t mean you explode them onto others, or act out, by the way). Do not enthrone your intellect as the only reality of your psyche. Instead of this spotty book here under review, I would instead HIGHLY recommend Karla McLaren’s

⭐. Despite the fact that Dreyfus and Kelly recognize the paucity of the Enlightenment conception of the mono-theistic autonomous individual who is only ego and thoughts and self-consciousness, and despite the fact that they correctly point out that some actions originate in a source deeper than the ego, they do not even mention Carl Jung once! It’s mind-blowing! They’re great when they are examining a single text, such as Moby Dick, but when they try to tackle the big picture they fall down. The question is not whether a polytheistic attitude towards life is more convenient and convivial for us moderns, but rather whether or not it is a more accurate model of the psyche. A great deal of psychiatric (and other) research suggests that it is.And–if I may address the authors personally–I mean, seriously–“meta-poiesis”? Guys, really, this is pathetic. Did you really have to coin an awkward new term for what most of us would simply call WISDOM? And, for that matter, what happened to APOLLO? You think that you have to abandon ethics and reason in a polytheistic system? That there is no power–no dimension–of the psyche that would be able to tell you that you’d best walk away from a Hitler rally but that you’d best walk toward a Martin Luther King rally? Seriously? Ethics and reason don’t need to be absolute and universally, mathematically applicable in order to be able to tell you that the one is good and the other bad. As for turning things in life into rituals, don’t you think that someone in Wallace’s situation does that? Don’t you think that most people do that to one degree or another? If you have a gut-level sadness and are suffering from depression, this WILL NOT help you. Perhaps part of Wallace’s burden was that he felt he personally had to find the “answers” (like Ahab after Moby Dick) and give them to people–that he had to be a savior.And perhaps this is part of Dreyfus and Kelly’s problem as well, or at least the problem with this book. Personally, I think it’s a bit presumptuous. Well-meaning, to be sure. But still . . .In any case, while I very much appreciated this books excellent discussion of Homer and Melville and Dante, and I think these chapters alone are worth the cost of admission here, I have to say that, overall, this book is shockingly inadequate to its (admittedly very high) intention, and I can’t recommend it to people who don’t much enjoy literary criticism and the classics. The book is meant for a general readership, and it’s meant to help people lead more intense and meaningful lives, and it fails dramatically on these counts. If you’re looking to this book to help you find meaning in life, and to construct a basis for making choices, you will likely be disappointed: it’s not much more profound than “be open to the world and its various sacred dimensions and to being swept up by them” and “discover what you really like and make rituals of these things” and “develop meta-poeisis. i.e. learn the art of living.” Not really profound and like-changing stuff, to say the least!However, if you’re looking to this book to take you on an enlightening, instructive, and at times brilliant tour of philosophy and a few great works of culturally significant literature and how world-views have changed over the history of the West, you will likely be very pleased with it.

⭐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?

⭐I found this a brilliant read. I discovered it on the back of listening to the online lectures of Hubert Dreyfus, about the later philosophy of Martin Heidegger.I’m a long time fan of David Foster Wallace and was happy to discover his life and work are used to structure the direction of the book. They work takes on one of the central problems of our time, the obsession with ‘productively’, without defining the ends that this productivity aims to actualise. You only have to pick up a newspaper on any given day to find a constant striving for increased GDP. However whilst the increased standard of living is undoubtably positive, it all rings a little hollow without an final purpose and with many suffering a crisis of meaning and the resulting mental health fallout, when they finally realise that constant effort for for achievement and status mean nothing without a target.The authors take on this problem in a uniquely heideggerian way, using a detailed understanding of some of the greatest works of literature of all time. Despite this grand undertaking, the book reads easily, is unassuming and unpretentious style, which seems to have led some reviewers to miss the significance of what the authors are trying to achieve.

⭐The central essays here on the move from Greece to Rome to Latin Christianity are excellent.

⭐In many ways this is an excellent book. It is erudite and informative and conveys the profound in a simple and entertaining manner. It is worth reading in particular for its chapters on Homer and Moby Dick. Also its emphasis on gratitude was refreshing. However in the final analysis I found its conclusions a little anticlimactic and disappointing in not providing greater hope. To any who feel as i do I would recommend reading David Hoffmeister’s “awakening through a course in miracles” which for me provides many of the answers to the questions posed by “all things shining”

⭐Too much intellectual fluff. Would have preferred more spiritual examples and stories.

⭐I have not read this book but the recipient was very pleased with this item. It was used as a ‘course book’ whilst studying for a particular qualification.

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