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

by Hubert L. Dreyfus

the new work is interested in the various states that precede and precipitate the flight to distraction: the boredom, the anxiety, the frustration, and the anger that propel us toward any distracting entertainment that offers relief.

The spiritual journey of Wallace’s IRS examiners consists in learning to live in these prior states—especially the state of boredom—and to find in them redemption and spiritual value.

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that [this] cliché . . . is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

The bizarre genius of the commencement speech is that it finds this struggle everywhere in life: in traffic jams and crowded supermarket aisles, in soul-killing muzak and corporate pop; in the “stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman” faces that stand as obstacles to our daily chore; even in “Have a nice day” from the checkout girl, said “in a voice that is the absolute voice of death.” Indeed, Wallace finds the struggle against banality, boredom, anger, and

frustration in all the “dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines” that make up our lives “day after week after month after year.” This is the existence from which Wallace offers us reprieve.

the choice to experience the world as sacred and meaningful—to do so by dint of effort and will—is a choice that is within our power to make.

It is a choice that takes strength and courage and persistence, of course; perhaps it takes even a kind of heroism.

But it is possible, Walla...

more than tha...

necessary in the mode...

“Maybe the answer,” he wrote in that letter to Franzen, “is simply that to do what I want to do would take more effort than I am willing to put in.” But this was not simply an observation about Wallace’s writing—it was an observation about his life as a whole.

Western culture in the twentieth century can be read, in part, as a series of responses to the death of God—to the death in the culture, in other words, of a grounded, public, and shared sense that there is a single, unquestioned set of virtues—Judeo-Christian virtues—in accordance with which one’s life is properly led. As the background assumption of God’s existence receded and atheism and agnosticism grew more common, it became less obvious that Judeo-Christian principles held true for all. Of course, as Dostoyevsky suggested in The Brothers Karamazov, if there is no God then everything is permitted.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, for example, can be read as a story about the continually unsatisfied hope for God’s return.

Nietzsche’s world had not declined so far. Nineteenth-century European culture on the whole still took for granted that the Judeo-Christian virtues were not only proper but sanctioned by God. Nietzsche could see that this was changing, that the background practices of the culture were pulling away from their supports, but he believed that the full transformation of the culture was still far in the future.

he shared with Wallace the nihilistic idea that, once that transformation had finally occurred—as it has in Wallace’s world—the lone source of meaning in human existence would be the strong individual’s force of will.

The “free spirit” is Nietzsche’s name for the individual who lives properly ...

This free spirit is no longer constrained by any external norms at all for what it is appropriate or permissible to do. It is literally true for the free spirit, as Dostoyevsky worried it would be,...

Wallace’s saving possibility, therefore, is the most demanding and the

most impoverished all at once. It is the most demanding for at least two reasons. First, it has raised the stakes, so to speak, when it comes to happiness.

But Wallace’s vision is demanding in a second sense as well. For it demands that this bliss be experienced constantly, without cease, through even the most banal and frustrating and painful and awful aspects of existence. Indeed it demands that Hell itself be experienced as fully paradisiacal bliss.

The Homeric Greeks were open to the world in a way that we, who are skilled at introspection and who think of moods as private experiences, can barely comprehend. Instead of understanding themselves in terms of their inner experiences and beliefs, they saw themselves as beings swept up into public and shareable moods.

For Homer, moods are important because they illuminate a shared situation: they manifest what matters most in the moment and in doing so draw people to perform heroic and passionate deeds. The gods are crucial to setting these moods, and different gods illuminate different, and even incompatible, ways a situation can matter.

The best kind of life in Homer’s world is to be in sync with the gods.

At the center of Homer’s world, then, is the sense that what matters is already given to us, and that the best life is the one that manages to get in sync with it.

Homer’s epic poems brought into focus a notion of arete, or excellence in life, that was at the center of the Greek understanding of human being.6 Many admirers of Greek culture have attempted to define this notion, but success here requires avoiding two prominent temptations.

the temptation to patronize that we have already mentioned.

But there is also a temptation to read a modern sensibility...

Excellence in the Greek sense involves neither the Christian notion of humility and love nor the Roman ideal of stoic adherence to one’s duty.7 Instead, excellence in the Homeric world depends crucially on one’s sense of gratitude and wonder.

What makes Helen great in Homer’s world is her ability to live a life that is constantly responsive to golden Aphrodite, the shining example of the sacred erotic dimension of existence.

Likewise, Achilles had a special kind of receptivity to Ares and his warlike way of life;

Odysseus had Athena, with her wisdom and cultural adaptability, ...

to engage with this understanding of human excellence, we will have to think clearly about how the Homeric Greeks understood themselves. Why would it make sense to describe their lives in relation to the presence and absence of the gods?

The gods are essential to the Homeric Greek understanding of what it is to be a human being at all.

The Greeks were deeply aware of the ways in which our successes and our failures—indeed, our very actions themselves—are never completely under our control. They were constantly sensitive to, amazed by, and grateful for those actions that one cannot perform on one’s own simply by trying harder: going to sleep, waking up, fitting in, standing out, gathering crowds together, holding their attention with a speech, changing their mood, or indeed being filled with longing, desire, courage, wisdom, and so on.

To say that all men need the gods therefore is to say, in part at least, that we are the kinds of beings who are at our best when we find ourselves acting in ways that we cannot—and ought not—entirely take credit for.

The notion that blind luck determines the course of our lives leads quickly to the nihilistic idea that our lives have no meaning. Roman Stoicism is grandfather to the nihilism of the secular age.

what is truly important is that the Greeks felt that excellence in a life requires highlighting a central fact of existence: wonderful things outside your control are constantly happening for you.

For us sleep is the blank episode that separates our moments of activity; when we are sleeping we are no longer quite ourselves. By contrast, in Homer’s world sleep is an event that epitomizes the human condition. It is often in sleep that the gods visit humans, give them direction and purpose, formulate their plans for them, quell their anxieties and refresh their desires.

Sleep is a canonical human event in Homer because it is the paradigm of an activity at which one cannot succeed by trying harder. And yet, one is not completely powerless in the face of it either. One can prepare oneself for sleep, be grateful that it comes, wonder at the transformation it brings about. And all these, for Homer, are characteristic of us at our best.

The Greek word for grace here is charis, which is the root for our word charismatic. Literally a charismatic person is one who has been favored by the gods with a gift of grace or talent. The charismatic person lights up a room, as, for instance, the great Russian ballet dancer Nureyev was said to do.

what is essential in all these examples is that one cannot achieve the result by trying harder. The person who tries to be charismatic inevitably comes off as a preening oaf; the person who deliberately reaches for the rock is likely to shred himself to bits; the person who tries desperately to go to sleep is guaranteed to have a long night of sleeplessness before him.

Homer says Athena enhanced Odysseus with grace because it is something Odysseus could not have done for himself.

The phenomenon is more common than you think—it occurs in sports like baseball, golf, tennis; football quarterbacks are not immune—and it is commonly called “the yips.”

The standard explanation is that the athlete begins to get in the way of his body’s finely honed ability to act of its own accord. Instead of letting the activity be drawn out of him, Knoblauch was attempting to generate the throw deliberately.

But if one thinks, as Homer does, that human action at its finest belongs to the domain of the gods—a domain that is necessarily beyond our ken—then it will seem obvious that trying to get clear about the situation will lead to an unattractive result.

it is clear that Homer invokes the gods

to account for the observation that a central form of human excellence must be drawn from without. A god, in Homer’s terminology, is a mood that attunes us to what matters most in a situation, allowing us to respond appropriately without thinking.

if the best kind of human life requires the presence of the gods, then the best kinds of human beings must invite the gods by expressing wonder and gratitude in their presence. To develop an appreciation, therefore, for those situations in life when favorable things occur out of our control, and to develop a sense of wonder and gratitude in the face of such situations—this too is required for a life well-lived.

In Aeschylus’s writings the gods govern what matters and determine what it makes sense to do in every situation. They demand a kind of unity to all one’s actions, and cannot rest content with the happy diversity that Homer allowed.

But Homer and his worshipers of the Olympian gods achieved their happy state only by repressing an older group of gods—the ancient gods of family loyalty, who stood for fertility, blood relations, and revenge. These ancient moods of vengeance and blood loyalty—amazingly!—are simply not a part of Homer’s world. But according to Aeschylus, there was a price to repressing these ancient moods. What mattered most in his world was not the happy diversity of Homer’s Olympian gods, but the opposition between two total and uncompromising senses of what is right: the new Olympian gods represent one, the ancient, primitive Furies the other.