Here, two distinguished philosophers from the heart of the profession offer a meditation on the meaning of life, in a sharp, engaging style that will appeal to readers both within the academy and beyond it. They provide a compressed narrative of changes in Western understanding of human existence over the course of nearly three millenniums, and argue that reading great works of literature allows us to rediscover the reverence, gratitude and amazement that were available in Homeric times…All Things Shining offers fascinating readings of works of literature chosen to illuminate this narrative…as well as passionate glimpses of the attitudes toward the world the authors urge us to regain.
The New York Times Book Review
Though brief, this is an ambitious book, offering insightful readings of authors including Homer, Dante, Descartes and Kant, as well as the novelists Herman Melville and David Foster Wallace…All Things Shining repays attention and reflection. It is a fascinating read and deserves an audience far beyond the borders of academia. 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.
The New York Times
Eminently qualified philosophers Dreyfus (U.C. Berkeley) and Kelly (Harvard) attempt to trace the decline of the West from the heroic, inspired age of Homer to our secularized, nihilistic age without a sense of transcendence and exultation. Unlike the ancient Greeks, the authors claim, today we lack a sense of the meaningfulness of life, of being called by a transcendent force. They probe this loss through a nonchronological roll call of writers, thinkers, and religious figures central to Western culture: Homer, Jesus, St. Paul, Dante, Luther, Descartes, Melville, and, representing today's unheroic age, David Foster Wallace But this sincere book reads more like a series of set pieces. Ambitious it is, but by turns it drifts or jumps, giving a sense of randomness to its argument. Late in the book, a long section on Moby-Dick notes, "Ahab is a combination of Kant's theory of human beings as autonomous selves and Dante's religious hope for eternal bliss." Such grand statements are not backed by a fully coherent, or a gracefully structured and proportioned argument. (Jan.)
Dreyfus and Kelly (philosophy, Univ. of California, Berkeley, and Harvard Univ., respectively) explore the history of Western literature and philosophy with the aim of exposing how the ancients were able to mine meaning from such pieces while contemporary Westerners are so overwhelmed by choices that they have become blind to the elevating qualities that reflection can provide. Writing in a style that is straightforward and readily accessible to general readers, the authors consistently provide their audience with both reason and model for reengaging wonder at intellectual wonder itself. As they unwind Western intellectual history from Homer, Aristotle, and Augustine to Kant, John Foster Wallace, and beyond, they point to the mechanism by which one generation or era posits meaning on its literary tradition and how that "new idea" suppresses earlier visions of enlightenment. Thus, by the new emerging, the older ideas and ideals necessarily become different from what they were in their own time of mergence. VERDICT Successful in every way: as a clear-eyed history and as a call to move from bloodless analysis to a return to ancient wonder; recommended.—Francisca Goldsmith, Infopeople Project, Berkeley, CA
Two distinguished professors seek mankind's salvation in the ancient Greek gods.
At first glance, this book would seem to be a rebuttal of the spate of arguments for atheism, and a ringing defense of polytheism, or an academic version of a self-help book, showing how to live a richer, more meaningful life by returning to precepts that preceded individual autonomy. In fact, Dreyfus (Philosophy/Univ. of California, Berkeley; On the Internet, 2001, etc.) and Kelly (Philosophy/Harvard Univ.) audaciously promise "nothing less than a philosophical and literary history of the West" in little more than 200 pages, aimed at the "nonspecialist audience" and "general reader." The authors successfully leapfrog through literary-philosophical history to suggest how we can reclaim redemptive qualities sacrificed to modernity. "When we develop in ourselves the ability for this kind of wonder and gratitude then we become a standing invitation to the gods," they write, asserting that one need not believe in those gods to recognize that one's feelings and fate are often shaped by forces outside the self and that there are limits to individual freedom and responsibility. In response to a metaphysical debate framed by Pulp Fiction, the authors write that "[t]he question that really matters...is not whether God was the causal agent but whether gratitude was an appropriate response." In other examples, Dreyfus and Kelly explore meaning (or the nihilism of meaninglessness) in the suicide of David Foster Wallace, the throwing problems of former baseball star Chuck Knoblauch and the rejection by Martin Luther of Aristotle. The book's wide scope is occasionally exasperating in its concision—"But before we move on to Descartes and Kant we will have to make a detour by way of St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante, who draw on Aristotle rather than Plato to make Christianity intelligible in Greek terms"—but the end result, detours and all, suggests a road map to the divine.
A provocative, illuminating and inspirational exhortation to "Ask not why the gods have abandoned you, but why you have abandoned the gods."