What It All Means

What It All Means
By SUSAN NEIMAN
Published: January 20, 2011


By the time they contemplate an application to graduate school, philosophy students have learned that it isn’t merely tacky to display an interest in questions about the meaning of life; it’s a major professional risk. For many decades, British and American students were urged to turn their attention instead to the meaning of language, while European philosophers were engaged in more portentous-sounding but equally arcane diversions. There were occasional, notable exceptions — Stanley Cavell’s work showed how the meaning of one’s words and the meaning of one’s life might coincide — but then Cavell was long considered to stand outside the real business of philosophy. Even more fatally, students were introduced to the history of philosophy as a series of epistemological puzzles decontaminated from troubling concerns about what it means to be human, a question that had moved the great philosophers of the canon as surely as any thoughtful 18-year-old.

ALL THINGS SHINING

Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age

By Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly

254 pp. Free Press. $26.


Against this background, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s “All Things ­Shining” is certainly good news. 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. These qualities, they believe, can be cultivated to provide a bulwark against the nihilism they rightly view as threatening our ability to lead meaningful lives in the 21st century. “The gods have not withdrawn or abandoned us,” they conclude. “We have kicked them out.”

In 2011, it’s disconcerting to read that we have been released from the ancient temptation to monotheism; much of the world hasn’t heard the news. But if Dreyfus and Kelly neglect those for whom monotheism remains a live option, they have much to say to those for whom it doesn’t. Mediated and suspicious, they argue, we have lost a way of being in the world that the Greeks found natural. The reason so many of us feel so miserable is that we can neither find meaning in ourselves alone nor give up the longing to find it somewhere else. “All Things Shining” offers fascinating readings of works of literature chosen to illuminate this narrative — from Aeschylus, Dante and Melville to David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Gilbert — as well as passionate glimpses of the attitudes toward the world the authors urge us to regain.

Dreyfus and Kelly begin with those happy polytheists, the Greeks, who were less reflective than we are, and less convinced that they were in control of the world. This left them open to experience a world in which things shine as works of art do, to feel gratitude not only for the bounties of nature but for human excellence in all its forms, itself regarded as a gift.

The authors bring that relation alive, but their narrative of its loss raises many questions. These start with their reading of Homer himself, which highlights Helen’s blithe description, in the “Odyssey,” of the affair with Paris that ignited the Trojan War — “an odd choice,” they comment, “for dinner party conversation in the Menelaus household.” They make it intelligible by arguing that in Homer’s world, erotic excellence is a sacred gift like any other human excellence, to be cherished without moral reflection. Something about this is true and important, but their conclusion that Homer’s world did not view the Trojan War as lamentable is hard to swallow. True, Homer doesn’t explicitly condemn Hector’s death; “he just describes how it affects Hector’s father, Priam.” But that’s how great artists work, and few scenes in literature are more affecting. Similarly problematic is the use of Odysseus’ praise of Achilles to argue that death in the Trojan War was simply accepted by the Greeks as one means to bring forth human excellence. For they ignore Achilles’ reply: far better, he says, to be a serf among the living than to lord it over the dead.