ALL THINGS SHINING by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly

For reasons unconscious, I'm finally reading Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining. I guess Gary Wills' definitive takedown of the book in the NYRB didn't entirely convince me. It should have.


Subtitled "Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age" (an idea that I find quite attractive, given that I've been doing it since junior high), this book promises so much and actually delivers so little that I'm tempted to remark that with friends like these, the "Western Classics" don't need enemies. Dreyfus and Kelly's arguments are weaker than a dying cancer patient, built on evidence so obviously cherry-picked that it belongs in a produce aisle, and stated so hyperbolically that I checked the copyright page for a Trump trademark. Additionally, the book's over-reliance on the writings of, and post-suicide hagiography around, David Foster Wallace marks it as an immediately dated artifact of the early 2010s. All the DFW references seem pretty pathetic today, a misguided attempt at trendy 'relevance' that weakens the book's 'long view' of the Western canon. It's as though Harold Bloom had ended his Western Canon with a Snoop Dogg-style rap about Fernando Pessoa. And in case that's not irritating enough, the Simon & Schuster copy editor must've been Sleepy Dwarf, because the text is riddled with elementary grammatical errors. Additionally, the academic authors' dismissal of existentialism (Sartre's) is a fatal blindness, for Sartre shows how the nihilism they decry is not an end but a beginning, point zero of any authentic life. There's no need for the unwise professors' giddy leap into mysticism; the Nothing is simply where we begin.


All Things Shining, in short, is not one of those titular things. In a time of fascism, religious fanaticism environmental catastrophe, and murderous corporatism (BP, Boeing...), a book offering a dubious 'cure' for the supposed 'nihilism' of a relatively tiny number of privileged Americans does seem direly beside the point. And that's how Dreyfus and Kelly's ahistorical approach leads them to shipwreck on the shoals of their book's inescapable now.


That said, the section on Moby Dick is actually not bad. They should've published it as an article and ditched the rest of the manuscript.