Comments on: The shining and the shiny: An interview with Sean Dorrance Kelly http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/10/24/the-shining-and-the-shiny/ Secularism, religion, and the public sphere Thu, 16 May 2013 19:41:38 +0000 hourly 1 By: Zohar atkins http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/10/24/the-shining-and-the-shiny/comment-page-1/#comment-75525 Zohar atkins Sun, 29 Jan 2012 13:49:30 +0000 http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/?p=26835#comment-75525 Doesn’t the distinction between shiny things and shining things, as described above, fall into a Platonic or metaphysical dualism, especially if it takes the distinction to map out objectively? Why should anything be considered intrinsically shiny as opposed to shining or vice versa? Doesn’t the shiny/shining distinction fall more within the eye, as it were, of the being for whom it’s being is an issue? While it’s true that light, quite literally, opens our eyes to what it illuminates, it seems that it is very much up to us, how we receive, channel, and allow the light to affect us. Heidegger is right to insist on our thrownness, and I take this insistence to constitute the thrust of any critique of a metaphysically conceived, fully autonomous self. But equally constitutive of who we are is our capacity to appropriate our being. From this perspective, it shouldn’t matter whether, ultimately, we find meaning in shiny or shining things. Consumer products, when encountered, can become sites of encounter and occasions for awe, just as sacred places and rites, when merely consumed without contemplation or mindfulness, can become merely shiny. So it seems the shiny/shining distinction cannot quite refer to actual “things out there,” which would be a hang-up of metaphysics, but are simply ways of describing our being-in-the-world, and might be better understood within Heidegger’s existential/existentiell and ontological/ontic distinctions. In light of this, though, and in light of Heidegger’s acknowledgment that the authentic and inauthentic are inseparable from each other, we should ask whether shiny things, as much as shining things, do not have an important role to play in our world. In “Heidegger and the Place of Ethics,” Michael Lewis says the authentic simply refers to Dasein in its uniqueness, while the inauthentic refers to Dasein in its commonness. Insofar as Dasein shares the world with others, it is inauthentic, average. But insofar as a singular locus of disclosure and self-understanding, it is authentic, “ownmost.” Thought this way, shiny things would simply refer to things insofar as we share them with others, while shining things would refer to things insofar as we appropriate them in our unique self-understanding of who we are. But then, everything is at once shiny and shining–sun and bus stop, starling and word, IRS form and window, song and seed.

]]> By: Terence Blake http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/10/24/the-shining-and-the-shiny/comment-page-1/#comment-68319 Terence Blake Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:41:11 +0000 http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/?p=26835#comment-68319 ALL THINGS SHINING is an ambitious book. It aims at helping us to find meaning in our lives by way of a philosophically informed reading of some of the great classics of the Western Canon. It seeks to address a popular audience rather than a professional one: it has its roots in Heideggerian philosophy but the style is not that of academic prose and it uses examples taken from news items, sport, and readily available literary classics such as THE ODYSSEY, THE DIVINE COMEDY, and MOBY DICK. It can be read without any major difficulty and with a great deal of pleasure, but it has the ambition of addressing the grand question of the search for meaning and for a life worth living in our contemporary world. This is a world that the authors, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly, describe as « postmodern », « technological », and « nihlist »: a world where the « shining things » have been lost, where we are subject to a crushing burden of choice without an unquestioned framework of meaning, such as served as a foundation for life and its meaning in previous epochs.

According to these authors the world was formerly a world full of intensity and meaning, « a world of sacred, shining things » (cf the preamble ), which elicited moods of wonder and reverence and gratitude and openness. However the shining things are now far, and life has become permeated with moods of sadness and lostness, a purely personal affair to be managed by the plans and choices of the closed-off « autonomous » ego. This is the explanation of the book’s title. The solution proposed is a reappropriation of Homer’s polytheism, now understood to be a polytheism of moods, such as we can see the outlines of in MOBY DICK. An important part of this response is the necessity to cultivate a specific skill that can help us discern when we can or should let ourselves be taken up in the moods we encounter and when we should resist and walk away: this skill they call « meta-poiesis ».

There is something very attractive about the ideas in this book: the pluralism of moods (« polytheism »), meta-poiesis, a subjectivity of openness to the world and wonder at its shining things. But there are ambiguities that make one wonder (in the other sense of wonder) whether the book avoids the trap of romantic nostalgia. Its vocabulary is often nostalgic: « lure back » the gods, « uncover » the wonder, « reveal » the world. Also there is the danger of proposing merely a postmodern theology, however philosophically distilled and sublimated. Here we can cite the suggestive slippage from « the shining things », index of a world charged with intensity and meaning, to the « sacred things », as if that were the same thing. But surely a life based on intensities, on moods and on meaning without any reference to the sacred is worth living.

On my blog AGENT SWARM (http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/) I have been commenting on the book ALL THINGS SHINING by Dreyfus and Kelly and their related lectures for over a year now. As I said, I like the pluralism of ATS and its analysis of incommensurabilities and its polytheism of moods, but I think it has a one-sided view of intensities or what they call « shining », that excludes both the ordinary and the “dark” intensities. All this talk of « shining » (really as pluralists they should say « shinings ») is somehow limited to best case scenarios, when shining is not, or should not be, a normative notion. One could compare this with Deleuze and Guattari’s cry in ANTI-OEDIPUS:

« Everything must be interpreted in intensity » (p173)

For Deleuze and Guattari this is already what Nietzsche and Artaud were doing. So I was glad to come across the blog http://schizosophy.wordpress.com/, which uses Artaud to illustrate shining, and Nietzsche to illustrate post-nihilist affirmation. As to Nietzsche I think that the fellow-pluralist William Connolly said it all in an article on Nietzsche (“Nietzsche, Democracy, and Time”). Connolly associates Nietzsche with an ethic of cultivation (meta-poiesis!), non-theistic gratitude, multidimensional pluralism, “nobility as multiple nobilities” (and not the Nazi deformation of Nietzsche’s thought as promoting a warrior ethic), and even “modesty as strength”.

In conclusion, I think the book is essential reading and I hope the discussion can deepen, intensify, and extend the dialogue that it contributes to.

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