News/Research

All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age

25 Jul, 2011

All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age

All Things Shining, by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly explore some of the great works of the West, from Homer to Melville and on through David Foster Wallace, with an eye towards the phenomenology of meaningfulness and the sacred that motivates them each in their different ways. The question for the book is whether the phenomenology behind these notions of meaningfulness is recoverable in the modern age. What was it about Homer's experience of himself and his world, for example, that motivated him to describe it with the kind of wonder and amazement that characterizes his work, and is any of that experience available now, after the death of God? And so too for Aeschylus, the Gospel of John, Paul, Dante, Luther, Melville, and so on. The book aims to set the mood for a kind of non-metaphysically laden polytheism that will stand against nihilism and fanatical religiousness alike, a polytheism that we see Melville calling us to feel.

Michael Roth, NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/books/04book.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=dreyfus&st=cse