Shining On
Posted on January 6th, 2011 in Uncategorized |
I’ve been remiss in not writing about All Things Shining, the new book by Harvardian Sean Dorrance Kelly (a reader of and occasional commenter on this blog) and Berkeley prof Hubert Dreyfus.
All Things Shining—which you can buy here, cheap!—is a book about what unites and inspires people, and gives meaning to their lives, that seems like it might attain the same sort of cultural traction that Bob Putnam’s Bowling Alone did.
David Brooks wrote this about All Things Shining in his column a few days back:
Dreyfus and Kelly say that we should have the courage not to look for some unitary, totalistic explanation for the universe. Instead, we should live perceptively at the surface, receptive to the moments of transcendent whooshes that we can feel in, say, a concert crowd, or while engaging in a meaningful activity, like making a perfect cup of coffee with a well-crafted pot and cup.
We should not expect these experiences to cohere into a single “meaning of life.” Transcendent experiences are plural and incompatible. We should instead cultivate a spirit of gratitude and wonder for the many excellent things the world supplies.
This isn’t quite devout enough for Brooks, but he takes All Things Shining seriously as an endeavor to get people to thinking about what provides happiness and meaning in life.
The Wall Street Journal gave All Things Shining a terrific review:
…this is no bland academic exercise. “All Things Shining” is an inspirational book but a highly intelligent and impassioned one. The authors set out to analyze our contemporary nihilism the better to remedy it.
What intrigues me about the book—I’ve ordered it, but haven’t yet read it—is the way Kelly and Dreyfus integrate high and popular culture in a work intended for a broad audience but hardly dumbed-down to achieve that.
(For all of her recent book’s popularity, this synthesis is something that Drew Faust has utterly failed to achieve in any of her work, and it seems a curious, hard-to-understand failing; she is a historian writing about life and death issues, but she is cool, bloodless, and provides little for broader audiences to discuss and consider. It strikes me as compulsively cautious, perhaps a failure of nerve, and a mountain that she has yet to climb. But I digress….)
I’ll have more to say about All Things Shining when I read the book. (Always helps, right?)
Meantime…have any of you? Love to hear your thoughts.
4 Responses
1/6/2024 9:53 pm
Hear, hear! I too am looking forward to reading it. But in fairness, the New York Times review, written by Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan, is more temperate, describing the book as “an Americanized version of Heidegger’s narrative.” Noting Heidegger’s Nazi ecstasies, Roth doesn’t mean that as an endorsement. He concludes, rather limply I thought, that the book “repays attention” and that we will have “much to be grateful for” if we read it. So I should go do that now instead of just reading the reviews!
1/7/2024 8:49 am
Thanks very much for the notice, Richard. I’m no specialist on how to read reviews, so I’ll let others decide whether the various public accounts are on the whole positive or negative. But I think Harry is right to point out that Roth (and some of the other commentators as well) remain unconvinced by the book’s final chapter, and even in some cases by its general narrative structure. Naturally, I think their concerns are misplaced. Still, I’m grateful for the attention the book is receiving, and I look forward to learning from the conversations that come out of it.
1/7/2024 5:20 pm
Saying that DGF has “utterly failed” to synthesize high and low culture for a broad audience seems rather like saying this blog has utterly failed to explain Louisiana politics or to assess the effects of aspirin on mucous membranes-as far as I can tell, neither has tried to. Her work may be cool and bloodless and so on, but this rhetoric of “failure” is the kind of stuff academics use to sharpen our own work’s claim to be publishable by magnifying its minor differences from others’. Let’s at least leave it there and not export it to public writing, too.
1/9/2024 6:41 am
Fair enough, Anon. You’re right to say that I’m criticizing DGF for a standard to which she’s never claimed to aspire.