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

by Hubert L. Dreyfus

THERE ARE AT LEAST two kinds of people who manage to avoid the contemporary burden of choice, but in the wrong way. First, there is the man of self-confidence

He plunges forth assuredly into every action he takes.

The man of self-confidence is often a compelling figure. Driven and focused, he is committed to bringing the world into line with his vision of how it should be. He may genuinely believe that his vision for the world is a good one, that the world will be a better place if he can shape it to his will, and sometimes he is capable of making changes for the better. But there is a danger to this attitude as well. Too often it turns out that the blustery self-confidence of such a person hides its own darker origins: it is really just arrogance combined with ambition, or worse yet a kind of self-delusion. As a result, when his plans fail, as they are bound to do at least some of the time, the self-confident man is often unable to recognize the failure. Stubbornly and inflexibly committed to his vision of how things ought to be, he has no ability to respond to the world as it actually is. The self-confident man believes that confidence is its own virtue; at the extreme, this kind of self-confidence can lead to fanaticism, as we’ll see in

the monomaniac Captain Ahab that Melville portrays in Moby Dick.

The genuinely confident agent does not manufacture confidence, but receives it from the circumstances.

THERE IS A SECOND WAY to avoid the contemporary burden of choice, but it is at least as unattractive as the path of manufactured confidence. We are thinking here of the person who makes no choices about how to act because he is enslaved by obsessions, infatuations, or addictions.

one finds oneself constantly craving the newest, latest post, wondering what the most recent crisis or observation or tidbit could be. One cycles through the list of websites or friends waiting for the latest update, only to find that when it is completed one is cycling

through the sequence once again, precisely as expectant and desiring as before. The craving for something new is constant and unceasing, and the latest post only serves to make you desire more. With this kind of addiction there is a clear sense of what one must do next. But the completion of the task fails entirely to satisfy the craving that set you on your way.

The burden of choice is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. It proliferates in a world that no longer has any God or gods, nor even any sense of what is sacred and inviolable, to focus our understanding of what we are. What we have seen just now, though, is that not every way of resolving choice is equal. Although willful self-confidence and addictive loss of control are both ways of shirking the burden—the first because it refuses to recognize alternatives and the second because it is incapable of doing so—neither of these conditions characterizes the experience of the unthinking heroic actor.

In some sense the habitual actor, like the heroic one, is neither willful agent nor unwilling slave.

But habitual action is not heroic. The difference is that whereas the habitual actor lacks a sense not only of himself but of his surroundings, the heroic actor by contrast has a heightened awareness of what the situation calls for.

This sense for what the situation demands is nothing like an objective awarene...

Bradley’s activity, superhuman as it may have been, took place only in the context of the limited domain of basketball. Autrey’s actions took place in the broader domain of life. But for the moment it is the similarity between the cases that we would like to emphasize. Both are at the pinnacle of human possibility precisely because they leave no room for the kind of human indecision that plagues us all.

Consider the Middle Ages, for example. During this period in the Christian West a person’s identity was determined by God. To say this is to take no stand on whether there actually was a God in the Middle Ages. The classic metaphysical arguments for the existence of God, or for the necessity of his various attributes, are irrelevant here. What matters instead is that in the Middle Ages people could not help but experience themselves as determined or created by God.

in the Middle Ages people could not help but experience themselves as determined or created by God. Indeed, it was so much a part of the way they understood the world they lived in, so taken for granted by everything that made sense to them, that it was virtually inconceivable that one’s identity might be determined in any other way.

it was so much a part of the way they understood the world they lived in, so taken for granted by everything that made sense to them, that it was virtually inconceivable that one...

the idea that everything had its proper place in God’s divine plan was not itself a belief one could accept or reject. It was an entire way of life.

That is not to say that in the Middle Ages one never made any choices. One could always willfully turn away from God’s plan and pursue a course that deviated from his desires. Or one could aim for the course of right action and fall short. In the terminology of medieval Christendom there were not only Saints but Sinners too, not only those who lived Virtuous lives but those who succumbed to the perilous attractions of Vice.

Despite their extraordinary variety, what is characteristic of all of Dante’s sinners is that their actions involve deviations from or perversions of a path already understood to be laid out by God.

It has always been difficult, in certain situations, to act in accord with the standards for living well—the Greek philosophers called this difficulty akrasia, or weakness of the will; it is the inability to do what we know to be the right thing.

By 1600 the Medieval World was breaking down. In particular, it was no longer possible to take it for granted that God’s will structures the universe. Very few people at the time, if any, explicitly recognized this development. Practices that a whole culture takes for granted are extremely difficult to identify. But we can find the clues to this historical development throughout the literature and philosophy of the time.

Shakespeare himself seems to have been nearly obsessed with the breakdown of the divine order. Whether he knew it or not, this development motivates many of his plays.

Consider Macbeth, for example. Here we find an individual who by his “o’ervaulting ambition” alone hopes to leap beyond his natural place in the divine order into a new and higher place as king. The very idea that one should, by one’s own will and desire, transform the divine order of the universe would have been anathema to Dante in the world of the Middle Ages.

For better or for worse, the divine order is tenaciously resisting the rise of self-directed ambition. It is as if Shakespeare can see this ambition as a potentially admirable trait even though the world he lives in will not yet support this way of life. The divine order is tenaciously resisting the rise of self-directed ambition, for better or for worse.

In general, it seems Shakespeare can see that the way of life based on a divine plan is crumbling but he can’t figure out exactly what to think about it.

consider the case of Hamlet. His famous soliloquy from Act III Scene 1, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” takes on the fundamental issue of whether he should choose to live or choose to die. The very idea that he understands this as a choice open to him indicates that his culture no longer takes it for granted that God determines these fundamental facts of our existence. This is not to say, of course, that nobody ever contemplated suicide before Hamlet. But the cultural interpretation of what one is up to when one is contemplating such a thought is radically different for Hamlet than it would have been for a character of the Middle Ages.

One of his main philosophical projects was to show that it is possible to know for certain, and without any doubt at all, the most basic things that we know. That there is an external world, for instance, or that people other than ourselves exist. It turns out to be very difficult to prove these things with absolute certainty.

But the idea that this is the kind of thing we could doubt at all, and the even more extreme idea that we should have to try to find out whether we could know this kind of fundamental thing for certain, is an idea that wouldn’t occur to someone who lived in a world in which these kinds of questions don’t really make sense. The Cartesian project itself would be understood as an act of hubris in the Middle Ages. The idea that we have to prove to ourselves that God isn’t tricking us takes as a background assumption that, well, for all we know God is tricking us. But this kind of assumption doesn’t even make sense in a world in which God is from the start understood to be the divine and benevolent architect of the universe.

sense in a world in which God is from the start understood to be the divine and benevolent architect of the universe.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, the great German philosopher of the late nineteenth century, famously claimed that God is dead. What he meant by this is that we in the modern West no longer live in a culture where the basic questions of existence are already answered for us. The God of the Middle Ages played the role of answering existential questions before they could be asked; but such a role is no longer conceivable.

RIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, the great German philosopher of the late nineteenth century, famously claimed that God is dead. What he meant by this is that we in the modern West no longer live in a culture where the basic questions of existence are already answered for us. The God of the Middle Ages played the role of answering existential questions before they could be asked; but such a role is no longer conceivable.

It is no longer taken for granted that nonbelievers are outside the realm of the human. That was the case in medieval Christendom: to be a nonbeliever was ipso facto to be evil, to have set yourself against the delights of all that is humanly worth attaining. Perhaps there are some fanatical religious subcultures that manage to sustain this exclusionary belief today. But insofar as a religious believer’s belief in God is consistent with the idea that there are admirable people who nevertheless do not believe, as for the most part is the case in the modern West, then religious belief cannot by itself close off existential questioning.

The idea that there is no reason to prefer any answer to any other, however, is called nihilism, and Nietzsche thought this the better description of our current condition after the death of God. Nietzsche thought that nihilism was a great joy, since it frees us to live any life we choose, but many find it horrifying instead. As Dostoyevsky puts it, “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.” Our view is that nihilism is every bit as closed-minded as fanaticism, and that neither is a sufficient ground on which to base a livable life.

Nietzsche thought that nihilism was a great joy, since it frees us to live any life we choose, but many find it horrifying instead. As Dostoyevsky puts it, “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.”

Our view is that nihilism is every bit as closed-minded as fanaticism, and that neither is a sufficient ground ...

Many of these sentences are complemented by lengthy endnotes that continue the process, as if to say that this is the way we are aware of ourselves in the modern age: we say something, wonder about what we’ve said, unsay it, ask about it again, circle back to it from a different perspective, qualify it, unqualify it, and so on, footnoting our endnotes and endnoting our footnotes to infinity. We conclude, if at all, without resolution.

by lengthy endnotes that continue the process, as if to say that this is the way we are aware of ourselves in the modern age: we say something, wonder about what we’ve said, unsay it, ask about it again, circle back to it from a different perspective, qualify it, unqualify it, and so on, footnoting our endnotes and endnoting our footnotes to infinity. We conclude, if at all, without resolution.

But if Melville is right that we wear the sacred practices of our culture tattooed upon our body, as our argument shall claim, then Wallace’s life must be seen as a cautionary tale. What we hold sacred, he seems to be saying, is the ability to footnote our commitments—to qualify them, change them, and take them back. Our most sacred commitment, in other words, is the freedom to choose our commitments. And the freedom to unchoose them again, when that is what we choose to do.

if Melville is right that we wear the sacred practices of our culture tattooed upon our body, as our argument shall claim, then Wallace’s life must be seen as a cautionary tale. What we hold sacred, he seems to be saying, is the ability to footnote our commitments—to qualify them, change them, and take them back. Our most sacred commitment, in other words, is the freedom to choose our commitments. And the freedom to unchoose them again, when that is what we choose to do.

The novel takes on addiction, depression, consumerism, terrorism, and tennis academies, among many other characteristic late-twentieth-century problems. It is—both stylistically and substantively—a detailed and deeply perceptive attempt to say what it is to be a fucking human being in America at the turn of the millennium.

Perhaps Wallace was not so much describing his own personal depression as he was describing aspects of the culture that that depression made him sensitive to.

was describing aspects of the culture that that depression made him sensitive to.

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.10

what makes these contemporary authors worth reading instead is that they are trying to find a way into the light. In seeing how they fail, we will prepare ourselves to search for the sacred possibilities still alive in the modern world.

in Wallace’s view it seems to have been absolutely essential. The struggle of the IRS examiners was Wallace’s own struggle with writing, and it was the struggle he saw at the center of modern existence as well.

The central challenge of the contemporary world, Wallace seems to think, is not just that we don’t know how to live meaningful lives; it’s that we don’t even seem to be able to focus for very long on the question.

INFINITE JEST IS in part an exploration of society’s increasing devotion to the perfection of distraction.

The film, like the book in which it appears, is called Infinite Jest. The book and the film both take their title from a well-known scene in Hamlet.

Wallace’s contemporary treatment offers us a whole culture taken over by Hamlet’s heavy disposition. The flight to distraction, however, ends no longer in the arms of a man of most excellent fancy, a court jester who bears you on his back and lifts your spirits. Instead, the power of infinite jest is sedating; it leaves you congealed, in your special recliner, having wet your pants. Entertainment of this perfect sort takes away our humanity instead of restoring it to us.

Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom.