ALL THINGS SHINING: A “Review”[1]
My review of this book is based on a particular way of “perceiving” cultural phenomena, here literature, as reflections (often unintended by the artist) of movements in the “background” or Being, as Heidegger says. While concealing itself, this background “allows” for the appearance of phenomena, in the way they appear.[2] In this book, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, the authors reference the great American classic, Moby Dick, as inaugurating the possibility of a “renewal” of ancient polytheism, in which the things of the world once again “shine forth”, with the potential to evoke an experience of the sacred.
To bring us closer to this real possibility, Dreyfus and Kelly show how selected Western literature reflects a steady movement in the background of appearances (Being), from the early Greeks to modern times. This is a movement from a polytheistic, enchanted world to our present secular world of nihilism, from a poetic mind, that receives meaning from a living world, as a bestowal, to an autonomous self-willed mind that must impose meaning on an otherwise silent and meaningless world. This is a story rooted in a particular interpretation of history that Heidegger promoted: history as a history of Being in which, at epochal moments, a complete transformation of the “invisible” background occurs, resulting in an entirely new configuration of the appearances, understanding of human beings, deities, and what counts as knowledge.[3]
Nihilism is a term for a configuration of consciousness/world that comprises a self-willed subject, author of all meaning, corresponding to a perceived meaninglessness world.[4] Freedom, responsibility, anxiety, despair, loss of meaning, i.e. all existential concerns, emerge as considerations for this autonomous subject. The authors show how nihilism strengthens as epochs give way to epochs, until we reach our modern times. The authors see the final historical contraction, or nadir, of nihilistic consciousness as pictured in Herman Melville’s book, Moby Dick, in the figure of Ahab—the embodiment of Melville’s feeling of “wickedness”:
Ahab lays out the metaphysical picture of the universe that animates his hatred: that every act, every object, and every event in the world has a deep truth standing behind its surface affairs, and that man’s purpose is to uncover these final, eternal truths. “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks,” Ahab says. Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick is, in effect, a monomaniacal pursuit of the final, ultimate truth about the way things are. “If man will strike, strike through the mask!” But there are no such final truths in Melville’s world; no reasoning thing stands behind the unreasoning mask. Ahab’s determination to find such a foundation—that is the wicked core of his monomaniacal monotheism.[5]
Dreyfus and Kelly go on to conclude their picture of our descent into nihilism and, as well, propose a way through, based on Melville’s “polytheism”—a way through to “the things themselves” in their shining:[6]
Ahab is a combination of Kant’s theory of human beings as autonomous selves and Dante’s religious hope for eternal bliss. But these accounts, each unlivable on its own, are the worst kind of wickedness when brought together [i.e. according to Melville]. They account for the “now egotistical sky” under which we live, and its inability to admit meaning beyond what our self-sufficient will can achieve. And they explain how we have chased away the gods of the earth, leaving only our now “unhaunted hill.” It will take a “highly cultured poetical nation” to lure back “the Merry May-day gods of old”: a nation of people who can find meaning in the rituals of their daily lives. The meaning they find will be unrepresentable in the sense both that there is nothing deep behind it and that it nevertheless will give us something beyond what we contribute ourselves. That is why the great Sperm Whale shall take the place of Zeus in the coming pantheon of gods. For the overpowering mystery of his blank, unrepresentable brow is what makes every ritual, if properly lived, a site of contentedness, Joy, and maybe to wipe away the drizzly November of the soul.[7]
Elsewhere, Dreyfus expounds on this notion of Moby Dick as the unrepresentable, pictured in the book as the whale’s having no face:
In Moby Dick, the whale is the nearest thing you get to God. He tells you from the beginning that Moby Dick is unrepresentable. There is this picture at the Inn, that he can’t make out what it is, maybe it’s a whale, but the whale has no face, the flipper is gesturing but you don’t know what the gestures mean. It has hieroglyphics on it but we can’t read them … the whale is god and the whale is unrepresentable. If you take it out of the water and look at it, you’ve lost it. You can’t look at it, no presence. What do you get instead? He (Ishmael) collects all sorts of experiences of the sacred along the way, the most important one being the squeezing of the sperm in the Pequod, getting a religious experience by squishing these globules while angels are standing by … Now, Melville says, Moby Dick keeps open the space, by being unrepresentable, in which particular gods and particular sacred experiences can show up.[8] [9]
With these short passages from the book, I may be able to now offer a short description of the authors’ account of how we got here, in our nihilistic godless world, which, for so many seems impoverished and dull or worthless, and how we may move from this nihilism towards a contemporary Polytheistic world, “a wonderful world of sacred shining things.”[10] As they say, “The project, then, is not to decide what to care about, but to discover what it is about which one already cares.”[11]
In their study of the history of the transformations in Being, the authors focus on how our experiences of the Divine have changed, along with all the cultural practices that gather around each historical understanding of the central value (“God”).[12] The thread they follow down through history is the changing, fundamental, culture-forming relationship between reality and the appearances, or as I like to say, the “inner”/“outer” relationship. This changing relationship is traced through the Western Classics, down from Homer to Melville, and this aspect of the book is alone an excellent study for the student of literature and history. As the authors put it:
How did the West descend from Homer’s enchanted world, filled as it was with wonder and gratitude, to the disenchanted world we now inhabit?[13]
The “enchanted world” is speaking to a style of consciousness in which thinking and perceiving are not divided, inner/outer are not distinguished, let alone separate. “Descending” from this style we have now arrived at a style of consciousness in which inner and outer are disjunctive—the world of Ahab who sees the appearances as “pasteboard masks”, having no interiority at all. Eternal truth, or meaning, i.e. the “inner” of our lives stands behind these masks and must be forcefully won by the will, thinks Ahab. This is his monomaniacal monotheism, the great wickedness, according to Melville. We can appreciate the dominance of this style of consciousness quite readily in the cultural practice of dream interpretation when we separate the “outer” appearance (i.e. the way the dream appears in memory) from its “inner” meaning and privilege the “inner” meaning, going after it in an Ahab-like, monomaniacal spirit.
As we all can understand, this style of consciousness is correlative to a world of appearances completely devoid of meaning or worth—nihilism, in a word. Melville’s extraordinary intuition concerning a future possible alternative consciousness/world configuration can be best articulated in his conception of the whale Moby Dick, the unrepresentable god. It’s not that Moby Dick is the hidden god who turned his face away from us, as in the Old Testament. The whale has no face. He cannot be seen.[14] As Dreyfus says above, if you try to take it out of the water to look at it, you lose it. “Moby Dick” stands for a reality that although self-concealing, makes possible the way phenomena appear in the world. We could just as well use the word “Being”, if we wanted to speak it philosophically, or other if we were more poetically inclined.
Melville is intuiting a reality that is not simply one phenomenon among the display of all “positive” phenomena but gives rise to those phenomena, in the way they appear. At the same time, this negative reality is not separate from the phenomenon but “beyond” them in some new sense that we must learn to think.[15]
All this is to say that Melville has discovered a new configuration of the inner/outer binary, overcoming Ahab’s (and our dominant) style of consciousness which is configured on the inner/outer disjunction, the end of a long historical process in the transformation of Being and the appearances. And he tried to say this new configuration through the literary conceit of the White Whale—the unrepresentable god. At one and the same time, Moby Dick is an animal, i.e. a phenomenon of the world and an unrepresentable fathomless reality!
A new configuration of consciousness/world is not simply a private affair. It is a transformation of Being that is catastrophic for a culture. All the appearances that are determined, in the way that they appear, by the old configuration of Being, go under. To take a modern situation, “inner” and “outer” lose their previous meaning as disjunctive opposites, with instability, “madness” or chaos now prevailing. There are many cultural or art forms that are pointing to this catastrophe, as the essays on my blog show.[16]
At this time, there is a growing cultural turn towards the new appearances—appearances that do not show up as outer objects devoid of spirit. I want to include two quotes here from recent essays. Both authors also advocate “a return to the things” and their descriptions show us, along the authors of this book, the problematic of our times and how some are approaching it.
It is too late to revive the deities and spirits that enlivened the world of our ancestors, and efforts to do so are invariably fatuous. But we can at least resolve to give some space to the nonhuman agents that have managed to survive—animals, for example, and yes, trees. We need to shrink our habitat and re-wild large swaths of the world. And we need also to make room in our minds for the uncanny when it occurs—the flash of sunlight that temporarily transfixes us and lifts us “out of ourselves.” The possibility must be left open that it is a wink from an entity or spirit that we know full well, from both science and monotheism, could not exist.[17]
The consequences of a fresh perspective might be political and moral as well as intellectual. A full recognition of an animated material world could well trigger a deeper mode of environmental reform, a more sane and equitable model of economic growth, and even religious precepts that challenge the ethos of possessive individualism and mastery over nature. Schrödinger’s question—what is life?—leads us to reconsider what it means to be in the world with other beings like but also unlike ourselves. The task could not be more timely, or more urgent.[18]
Both passages have the character of exhortations, urging us in the direction of “re-enchantment”. For Ehrenreich, this could happen in an ecstatic flash of sunlight, if we have developed a receptivity and readiness for the “uncanny”. Lears calls for a full recognition of an animated material world, the possibility of which Ehrenreich rejects. Nonetheless these calls to action are growing in frequency and arise from a growing urgency that we may be in a kind of end game for our and other species, perhaps all life. Yet, as a spur to appropriate action, we know that the method of exhortation alone is singularly ineffective.
Dreyfus and Kelly do tell us their methodology for achieving a new form of polytheism and they do give us many examples of what such a modern “polytheistic” cultural practice could look like. Their method centres on moods that can overcome us or pervade “the atmosphere”, requiring us to be receptive to whatever way the things now appear, as determined by those moods. There is no mention of the inner/outer disjunction in this phenomenology. These moods are “the call of the gods” according to the authors, drawing from their extensive knowledge of Homer. The phenomenology of moods and that of the Homeric gods is the same. The only difference is that, today, we must re-awaken a “Homeric” sensitivity or receptivity, whereas in Homer’s time such receptivity was simply given, or if you like, was a central cultural practice, readily understood and in no need of strengthening or awakening. Today, according to the authors, this Homeric practice is discoverable through the experience of moods, across scale—from a personal ritual of having coffee to mass sports events or Presidential elections.
The existential phenomenological conception of moods already overcomes the inner/outer disjunction because it describes an existential phenomenon—the way that we in fact live our lives in relation to moods, before we reflect on what we are doing. For example, when a mood of love overcomes us, we spontaneously experience joy and a real, objective perspective of the appearances in the world opens up before us, one that is not otherwise available to our experience. There is no need to ask if this mood is my inner state that I am imposing on the unresponsive world. Only the Ahab style of consciousness needs to ask this question.
The key to this new cultural practice of discovering meaning in the real appearances that arise, corresponding to a particular mood, lies in Melville’s marvelous conception of Moby Dick, the unrepresentable god. Gods, or a particular god, are the bestowers of meaning. They grant dignity and worth on both things of the world as they appear under the god’s governance, and on us. They make claims on us and our actions become intelligible and worthwhile, even if they end in death. Moby Dick as the unrepresentable bestower of meaning is, at the same time, pictured by Melville as belonging to this world, not removed from it in some hypostasized eternal “true world” as Ahab believes. What can this startling prophecy mean? How are we to understand it?
We must now re-think what “beyond” means and what “infinite depth” means if we are not to think them in monotheistic Ahab-like terms—that the truth is “out of this world” of error in some hypostasized “beyond”. For the Ahab-style of consciousness, the things of the world have no infinite depth of being at all. They are as he says, pasteboard masks, surface only—thoroughly disenchanted. Infinity has become like everything else—positivized so we can easily talk of the literally infinite depth of outer space but we cannot conceive of an infinite depth of meaning as the within-ness of the things of the positivized world of Ahab.
Melville’s Moby Dick intuition forces us to think the infinite depths of the beyond in an entirely new way: we must think the appearances, as governed by moods, when they occur, as being both ordinary things which at the same time disclose an infinite depth of meaning, without our needing to abandon the appearances or this world. Melville gives us a magnificent illustration of how this could work in actual lived experience when he offers a description of Ishmael massaging the spermaceti in a bath on the Pequod, a dreary job required to restore its liquidity from an initial waxy condition. But what happens when a mood of communal love descends on the small group of sailors assigned to this monotonous task?
Would I keep squeezing that sperm forever! … In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.[19]
This kind of “given” experience of infinite depth of meaning (angelic presence) is what Ehrenreich is pointing to when she speaks of “the flash of sunlight that temporarily transfixes us and lifts us ‘out of ourselves.’ ” For Dreyfus and Kelly, the phenomenological key lies in our attunement and receptivity to moods. When a mood approaches us, pervading the moment, we can then experience the appearances (the way things now appear) that the mood brings forth, not as pasteboard masks, but as transparent to and co-extensive with an infinite depth of meaning, as Ishmael discovers.
Moods are phenomena that bind us to this world while, at the same time open us up to the depths of infinite being, the unrepresentable god, Moby Dick. When a mood overtakes us, and we surrender to it, we become mouthpieces of embodied being![20] When we thus “speak”, the mood gains voice and utters the speech of ours and the world’s embodied being. Life speaks!
For Dreyfus and Kelly, the appearances that are disclosed by a particular mood are already available to us. We have simply withdrawn our attention from them and the practices associated with those appearances have been long marginalized. What was a central cultural practice in Homer’s time is now a marginal practice. As phenomenologists they claim that:
There is no essential difference, really, in how it feels to rise as one in joy to sing the praises of the Lord, or to rise as one in joy to sing the praises of the Hail Mary pass, the Immaculate Reception, the Angels, the Saints, the Friars, or the Demon Deacons.[21]
In other words, the practice of praising the Lord was once central to European culture. It became marginalized as the Church gradually lost its authority and more secular practices assumed central place. But the mood of praise remains the same and can be re-discovered as such with our attunement and receptivity to the appearances thus disclosed to us. In this way, say the authors, the normally pasteboard mask of appearances today reveal their infinite depth of meaning to us:
A thoughtful and graceful ballpark tunes people to the same harmonies. It inspires common pride and pleasure, a shared sense of season and place, a joint anticipation of drama. Given such attunement, banter and laughter flow naturally across strangers and unite them into a community. When reality and community conspire this way, divinity descends on the game, divinity of an impersonal and yet potent kind.
This infinite depth of meaning that a mood-infused event can disclose can easily be attested to by the plethora of literature that often follows. For example, we could think of the literature, movies, etc., that sprung up, infused with conspiracy theories, as a dark mood of paranoia pervaded the USA after the assassination of Kennedy. The normally mundane appearances of institutional life took a dark turn as images were conjured of white men in power, sitting in the darkness of governmental, smoke-filled rooms, quietly and menacingly calculating the death of a popular President.
Broadly speaking, Dreyfus and Kelly are exhorting us to pay fresh attention to already-given cultural practices that have been marginalized. These could be made central again, consistent with our modern understanding of physical reality. This would mean valorizing the primary moods of wonder and gratitude rather than an Ahab-like monomaniacal striving for the truth behind appearances.
In their discussion of the history of Being, they show how we “descended” from inhabiting an animated, Polytheistic (Homeric) world of wonder and gratitude to our current nihilistic world of anxiety and meaninglessness. Pivotal to this historical account, are the Reconfigurers:
Reconfigurers change a culture so radically that they cannot count on an already established language and shared practices to make themselves intelligible. As a result, reconfigurers are essentially incomprehensible to the people of their culture. Indeed, they are barely intelligible to themselves. …
Jesus transforms radically the whole Hebrew understanding of human being and of what counts as a life worth living. Instead of outward actions, Jesus organizes the worthy life around private, personal, inward desires.[22]
Jesus the Reconfigurer achieves this transformation in culture by reconfiguring a marginal practice already in place in the times of the Old Testament and bringing it to the center. The authors point to the Commandments and their behavioral injunctions, such as the relatively marginal prohibition against adultery. Jesus revitalized and centred this prohibition in a totally new dimension of experience, the interiority of the heart’s desires. How you act is not as important as what your desires are aiming at, whether you act on them or not!
Dreyfus and Kelly point to modern attempts at reconfiguration too. The music festival at Woodstock in the sixties offered a transformation in understanding of what really matters, “a new mood of openness, enjoyment of nature, dancing and Dionysian ecstasy became central”, at least for a few days.[23] But, in the end it failed to become a central practice for us.
The authors resist any attempt to explain how the Reconfigurer emerges and how the totally new transformed understanding of the appearances occurs from one epoch to another, because it is in fact inexplicable, and not based on rationality. Therefore, I would add, such transformations are not controllable by us. This is tantamount to claiming that we cannot transform our culture out of nihilism by force of will.
We can however look for signs of possible reconfigurations taking place today! My proposal here suggests a cultural practice. Its mood can be identified and the correlative appearances to this mood can be brought forward via some articulation (art form) for the consideration of others. The mood associated with a modern practice of “waiting for signs” is one of love, receptivity, attentiveness, and welcoming the unfamiliar![24] The appearances that really matter within this mood are conveyed eloquently in the I CHING’s hexagram of The Preponderance of the Small, whose image is that of a bird carrying the message that “it is not well to strive upward, it is well to remain below. Striving upward is rebellion, striving downward is devotion”.[25]
In fact my doctorate was completed this way, i.e. by paying attention to the small and acting on the hints, auguries, unexpected details that unexpectedly “shone forth”. My work “began” Dante-like: “I woke to find myself in a dark wood, where the right road was wholly lost and gone.” At my wits’ end, I consulted the I CHING, which produced the hexagram of The Preponderance of the Small. Not knowing what else to do, I took it seriously and lowered my sights to the ground and began paying attention to details that would otherwise be overlooked—details whose “guidance” I must be willing to act upon in some way. The first hint came in a dream, and a detail within that dream—a lighthouse “at the end of the world”. The story of what followed when I acted on this hint can be found in my essay “Lighthouse at the End of the World” [26] The path to my doctorate was consequently hardly a straight line. It was full of twists and turns, spirals, and strange unexpected events, upsets and near misses!
And a reconfiguration occurred!
This reconfiguration has occurred as my within-ness or my interiority, not as a new central cultural practice at this time. Of course it may never do so. There are so many violently competing narratives as to what the contours of our collective future may or should be that we must characterize our present times as completely chaotic and unpredictable. But, as a result of this configuration, a new stable mood has descended on my life and a new set of appearances have emerged for me. My subsequent books are simply my attempts to articulate this mood and its appearances—one man’s contribution to the unknown future.
Most of my life had been coloured by a prevailing mood of intense anxiety and impending doom.[27] This mood was articulated in a personal life of chaos, in which failure and destruction prevailed: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, “ as Yeats prophesied. Such was my life! But a new mood has emerged for me—a quiet joy! This is passing strange to me as the world’s mood continues to darken into terror and despair (no way out). I share that mood of course and depression often takes me over, but this other mood of joy is also there, and seems to be permanent now. In my books I seek to articulate the appearances that accompany this mood of joy. The contours of the world, when this mood prevails, can be said many ways, by appeal to emerging art forms for example that have caught my eye, attuned as it is to these new appearances.
It seems that a governing characteristic of this new set of appearances is, first of all, a loss of interest in judging “inner” from “outer”, fiction from fact, etc. These fundamental binaries that have stabilized out Western culture for thousands of years are no longer of any interest to this new configuration of “background” reality. So for example when I am in conversation with others, I no longer need to seek the truth of the matter, or sort out waking reality from dreaming reality. I pay imaginal attention instead to the flow of language. This kind of attention has released a totally surprising result. I have been opened up to the sensuality or aesthetic quality of language/being. Recently I began a conversation with a friend on the nature of language when he quickly dismissed my point of view by his becoming “the expert”. Previously I would have become stubborn and a fight would ensue. This time I received an image of a door slamming shut. I even “heard” it. I immediately became curious about my experience of having a door shut in my face and any residue of stubborn retaliation disappeared. I did not interpret the slamming door in terms of the inner/outer binary (e.g. my friend has a closed mind etc.) Rather, it was just so! Reason quieted down and sensory imaginal experience became privileged.
Although my research and attempts to articulate this new configuration continue I am heartened to tentatively propose that such experience as I have outlined here may be the beginning of a new paradigm that Wallace Stevens names as one of his poems: “not ideas about thing but the thing itself.”
[1] Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly: All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York. Free Press, 2011.
[2] The authors are scholars of Heidegger and are interpreting the Classics in terms of existential phenomenology and the history of Being.
[3] One compelling example concerns knowledge of our origin. This story changes from epoch to epoch. For example: from being spiritual descendants of Adam and Eve in our essence, which modernity no longer can accept, to presently accepted knowledge of our essentially being the outcome of an impersonal evolutionary process in time that has no “spiritual” origin.
[4] In the sense that the world no longer makes a claim on us, so that we know who we are and how we are to comport ourselves.
[5] P.160
[6] From Wallace Stevens.
[7] P. 168
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q2Fsnj49GI (my transcription)
[9] “Sperm” = spermaceti: a waxy substance in the whale’s head, mistaken for sperm. It had many household uses.
[10] P. 222
[11] P. 215
[12] “Being” is a word I must use to say the “unsayable”. “Life” is an alternative term and both approach the mystery and problematic of language and its reference.
[13] P. 88
[14] We are reaching a point of describing the indescribable in the same manner that using the word “Being” attempts.
[15] I.e. not beyond in any metaphysical sense, as if there were a heaven or eternal truth that we could have access to, leaving the world of error behind, in Ahab style.
[16] www.lighthousedownunder.com/jwoodcock/wp. My books explore this process in greater detail.
[17] Barbara Ehrenreich. “Displaced Deities”. https://goo.gl/FCCEkl
[18] Jackson Lears. Material Issue: reclaiming a living cosmos from the dead-end tradition of Western scientism. https://goo.gl/0KhfR3
[19] Moby Dick. Ch. 94, as cited by Dreyfus and Kelly, p. 167.
[20] Which at this time I call, “wounded being”. See my essay, Frida Kahlo: Mouthpiece for Wounded Being at https://www.academia.edu/s/75b289c784/frida-kahlo-mouthpiece-for-wounded-being
[21] P. 192
[22] Pp. 103 & 108
[23] P. 103
[24] As in “welcoming the coming guest” (C. G. Jung). See my book, The Coming Guest and the New Art Form.
[25] Wilhelm translation. Hexagram 62.
[26] See my book, Living in Uncertainty Living with Spirit for an account of this unusual path I took.
[27] See my autobiography The Imperative.
