Searching for Meaning in a Secular Age

this program is a presentation of uctv for educational and non-commercial use only welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guests today are Sean Kelly who is professor of philosophy at Harvard University and you Burt Dreyfus who is professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley their new book is all things shining reading the Western classics to find meaning in a secular age gentlemen welcome to our program what are there circumstances that led you to write this book well it started with me a while back I guess maybe 10 or 15 years that I wanted to give a introductory course where students what beginning students would understand why it was important and interesting to do philosophy but instead of using philosophy books I decided to use the great books in literature that books that focus the understanding of what it is to be human and what it is to be for some epics and that's how I got into it then I gave what my philosophy six which is a bunch of famous books homer and Aeschylus Virgil Dante and our hero Melville moby dick and that's that's the background Sean comes sinneth on the story as the as my starting out as teaching assistant and my PhD and added a whole frame to my list of important grade books so we should hear his frame well yeah it was probably more than 10 or 15 years ago really graduated 15 years ago okay yeah 15 15 or 20 years ago and uh and what struck me when I heard Bert talk about these great works was how much the things that he was saying affected the students and affected me and it seemed to me that this was more than just a story about how things used to be in other epochs in the history of the West but it seemed to be a story that affected people now in a very personal way so I struggled when I started teaching a version of this version of this course I struggled to figure out how you could frame it so that it would make explicit that what you were trying to do when you were reading these books was somehow to figure out what was still relevant in them for for us nowadays and that's the kind of frame that we ended up giving to the book and as we talked about the goal of the book you you right our goal is to recognize and bring back to life those practices that's it can sustain a sense of the sacred in our secular age what do you mean by sacred ah well we say different things at different times we were just talking about this yesterday one of the things that we mean by sacred is we borrow a phrase from Nietzsche Nietzsche said that the sacred we discovered we actually said it a little bit wrong in the book Nietzsche said something like the sacred is whatever it is in a culture at which you're not allowed to laugh in the book we said at which you can't laugh and that's sort of misleading but at which the society doesn't allow you to laugh and it looks like in epics previous epochs in the history of the West there was always some range of stuff at which the culture wouldn't allow you to laugh it was so serious and so important and so taken for granted by the culture that it grounded everything and you couldn't really look at it and distance yourself from it but in our culture it looks as though arguably at any rate there's almost nothing at which you're not allowed to laugh and so that's one of the things that we mean when we say this is a secular age in which there's no notion of the sacred and and I get the sense that both of you in part were influenced by the students you work with in the sense of well they asked themselves questions about well what should I do with my life should I choose this should I choose that and and my sense is that your notion of the sacred is about also what is a meaningful choice in the context of my life say as a student or someone trying to make a decision me or for you I think it's for you okay I thought you were going to say that's part of the frame yeah that's part of the frame so I think it's true I mean one of the things you want to do when you teach a course and sometimes you manage to succeed and sometimes you don't is to teach it in such a way that the material is really going to speak to the students so one of the things you're doing when you teach a course is you're listening to try to figure out what sparks the students interests of from among the things you're saying and what doesn't and one of the things it occurred to me consistently struck my interest when I was a student and Burt was saying things or my students interests and I was saying things had to do with the idea that somehow we find ourselves we contemporary folks find ourselves confronted with choices consistently all sorts of choices our students in particular find themselves confronted with lots of life choices but everyone does and that we consistently try to find a way of understanding on the basis of what we're supposed to be making these choices and it looks like one of the ways of understanding the dilemma of our contemporary age is that it's no longer obvious on the basis of what you're supposed to make these life choices that might distinguish our age from earlier epochs in the history of the West where it was more was clear on the basis of what you were supposed to be making choices about your life and so we tried to so I tried to frame the course so that it would look as though it was at least potentially offering the students a way to read these texts so that they could find answers to that kind of question and and where we are today in the secular age and will in a little while talk about how this came about but but the dilemma for people trying to decide to find a meaningful course for their life with some reference to to the communities values that that we're in a state where there seems to be nothing you really call it the age of nihilism yeah I think I'll just take this one that you want to add to it or I know that this is also important frame that's right which Jean put around my back door okay all right I I mean I think right the the secular age is is not actually our term that's a term we borrow from other philosophers Charles Taylor is a philosopher who's a friend of ours and and we think it's got important things to say about this in his book called a secular age but what what Charles Taylor says is that our age is a secular age in the following sense it's a secular age in the sense that even for people who are religious believers in our age of whom there are many and certainly in the United States there are many religious believers religion doesn't play the role in their lives that it used to play in earlier epochs in the history of the West and the reason it seems not to play the role in their lives is that the role religion used to play was giving you a certain ground on the basis of what you understood how you were supposed to make decisions about your life but it could only do that if it was the kind of thing that you weren't really allowed by the culture to distance yourself from and that used to be true say in the Middle Ages in the middle is uh it used to be true that if you came across someone who didn't share the dominant religious beliefs of the culture which presumably if you were in the dominant in the majority where your religious beliefs you came across someone who didn't share those beliefs then the fact that they didn't share those beliefs made it justifiable for you to consider them less than human just in virtue of the fact that they didn't share your religious beliefs but in our culture that doesn't seem to be a justifiable move anymore it seems like the society insists that it has to be possible when you come across someone who doesn't share your religious beliefs that they might nevertheless be living in an admirable life a life that you could admire a life that you could maybe even consider yourself aspiring to and if they can do that without sharing your religious beliefs then it can't be your religious beliefs that determine for certain what the right way is to go on so even for people who have traditional kinds of religious beliefs in our age those beliefs don't play the same kind of grounding role in the culture that they used to and the danger the threat is that what will happen in the culture then is that you won't have any way of understanding what's more important than anything else when you're making decisions about how to go on and that state where nothing seems any more important than anything else is the state that Nietzsche called the state of nihilism the state that odd WH Auden said in a poem the state where all elsewheres are equal the state where every choice is equally good and that's a pretty neat you thought that was a great thing but I think we think that's an unlivable state to find yourself in and so the threat of nihilism is a threat that's peculiar to the secular age now now the third goal I'm trying to walk you through your goals we did these were embedded in the middle of the book I found but you say you want to ask is there anything in the self understandings of particular errors from our history that we can use to combat the nihilism of our sacred age so you're trying to construct an answer to this dilemma that we've just described I think it's something like that although I'm not sure I would say construct an answer I would say something like we're trying to open people up and make them sensitive to things that people in earlier epochs were automatically sensitive to because of the way their cultures were organized and because of their self understanding and their understanding of the world we're trying to make them sensitive to those things that people were earlier sensitive to that we've sort of lost our sense of and the reason to do that is that in these earlier epochs they weren't confronted with the particular challenge that we are confronted with so the natural question when you're reading these great works of art from the earlier epochs is is there anything in them that I could appropriate for myself or that our culture could appropriate for ourselves that would allow us to resist this peculiar threat that they sort of automatically resisted but that we are that we find ourselves confronted with so this is really an important argument for what you do that is the extent to which in in your courses you you actually go back and look at the the various epochs and and what were the important ideas that's right and I think Bert was doing it sort of automatically he sort of somehow had this soui generous sense that these texts were the important ones and that you really needed to be delving into them and understanding what they were about and seeing what understanding of being they they gathered together and focused and and what I saw was that it was affecting students in this amazingly personal and interesting way so my question was something like why does it do that what is it about our culture that allows the kinds of things that Bert's already doing to affect students in the way that it that it does now as I walk you through your book I want to comment that it's a it's a beautifully written book so it's really a great book for the general audience but I want you to explicate one thing that you say here you say this is a phenomenological rather than humanists or hag alien reading of the history of the West it focuses on the way people experience themselves and the sacred explain that then again and that's still so much not my way of thinking about it that I can sort of that's what Shaun wrote that Shaun wrote at all he puts the framework around it with just while I'm talking what what I was focusing on was look at these this amazing fact there are these various ways of understanding what it is to be a human being what it is to be a thing what it is to have a history and all that with I came from a little town in Indiana where they didn't have any understanding of any of this never heard of dusty up see and Dante and so forth and when I was an undergraduate reading these books for the first time I thought that was one of the most exciting things in the world that there was what now I would call because I see that other people Heidegger particularly has called it that is the hidden history of the West that is that there has been a series of epochs in the history of the West which gave us whole different understandings of what it is to be and I thought that was just so interesting I'd never occurred to me that it was going to help me with my nyl ism because I never really occurred to me that I was suffering from Niall ism but I can see now why when I listen to Sean students come up to me in the supermarket and so forth and say you've changed my life and they get I get email and maybe once a week telling me that I've changed somebody's life with the podcast and that's because that's where the frame comes in there they do need to not just say what are they going to do with these other epics that's the next question and again I didn't have any plan in mind but what they what I see now part of he through Franz the way of saying it is they will see in these other epochs things that were central once and our marginal now but they're still there around in our epic the great athletic events the the music that the dinner parties they were already in Homer two thousand years ago is that the right number almost ruffles almost three thousand years ago and we maybe can still get the kind of excitement and meaning and insight and intensity out that that they had in the center of their lives we can find it in the margin of ours thanks to these great works and then and that's a whole other story which I don't know how to do but they will have to learn to do develop the skills for bringing back these marginal practices and putting them in the center of their lives so that they again have what the earlier people thought of as their gods they they will find their own new gods which won't be cell gods that they invent and they won't be totally new they will find the sacred and the gods that were there in these other epochs in an intense way and bring them back in a new way that's why we end up with moby dick the only person who sees this is Melville who says explicitly that he wants to bring back the Homeric gods and and he is in the course of Moby Dick collecting the sacred wherever he finds it from all these other cultures instead of it the other epochs in the history of the West for the time you get to Melville it's the whole Westers I mean the whole world is there available so he sails all around the world picking up the cultural a sacred of the meaningful the the intense and so forth where and getting in sync with it wherever he finds it and bringing it back now that I say it I don't see exactly how that fits with the homer as he now that we have to think about this and they're seated there seem to be two different stories both of them right that you go back and he Melville wants to go back to the Homeric God's but he also wants to get in touch with all the other gods and sacred that he can find and that's not incompatible that's right that's just two wonderful sources of meaning and intensity and insight and he's for both of them and my course seems to be giving people access to both of them and so they get all excited so what is the theme that connects the world of Homer with the world of Melville they seem to be so disparate yeah that's right because Melville is the puzzle here there he is in Moby Dick doing two things collecting the sacred and worshipping all a little all the gods even the little wooden god yo-yo of Queequeg his friend he's ready to do the fasting and do the practices for all of them that's one thing and then there's this claim that I was just citing that we should get back the Homeric gods and it puts soos at the head of it all that that's it what he says in Moby Dick what's the connection between all these different references to the gods and the sacred the positive references well they're just the opposite of what you'd expect they're all the cases of non monotheism monotheism is the enemy of the multiple local sacred and so we're at wherever he Melville or me can collect the sacred and and the gods as a plurality of possible meaningful experiences I do it and whenever I can criticize any kind of autonomous independent fundamental complete these are all bad things from Melville's and from our our point of view we we questioned them though the bottom line is I never bothered to mention this course which is about we keep talking is called from gods to God and back that's how we had the Homeric gods we lost them one by one and step by step in effect and till we got to the super thing with Dante where there was one God and it was all created by him and for him and so forth and then we started out on the way back to Homer I want to sort of unwrap the complexity here and in what what you're really doing in the book to see where we are where we've arrived is to look at these different epochs and essentially define the paradigm that allows people in that age to find the sacred and in you know you really start with Homer and I think you you really end with Melville as you were you were just discussing now let me let's explore this a little you are nostalgic for the Homeric world is that fair oh good yeah it is not no oh we don't want to return to the Homeric right so but but you you well let then let's say it this way then you see in that world important insight into the nature of the problem and into the solution as adapted to us not the way we can't go back to worshiping Apollo and Athena and getting messages from them but what they what they stand for what they bring to us what they what they manifested we can get back in touch with that and bring it into our world in a way that connects it with things that are still on the margin of our concerns is there something I'm leaving out of that well I was gonna I was in a slightly different way of saying it I mean one of the reasons it wouldn't be right to say that we're nostalgic for the Homeric world is that there's a lot of stuff that you just wouldn't want from the Homeric world and I think it's really true that there are lots of ways in which our understanding of ourselves has got things that it's better to have or more appropriate to have for us then then homers understanding for instance as Bert said it's not part of the proposal that we should go believing that Athena and Zeus and Aries are sort of causal ultimate causal agents of the universe or anything like that the view that we have is supposed to be completely consistent with everything we understand about the physical nature of the universe and in particular not to posit extra causal entities but what we think that they're sensitive to that we've lost a sensitivity to is a certain way of understanding ourselves that uh that recognizes that's a lot of the time when we're at our best and when we're being the kind of being that it seems appropriate for us to aspire to be the way we're acting isn't fully under our control it doesn't feel that way when we're and this happens you know there are tons of examples of it but you know great athletes often say in the moment when they're when they're doing something great that it didn't feel as though they were the the source of their activity it felt as though it was just happening through them or for them or something like that and we want to we want to emphasize that experience as an experience that's genuinely worth getting back in touch with and also we want to emphasize the fact that when you're sensitive to that as a moment of greatness in your life it feels automatically as if there's a kind of mood that's required after the fact which is the mood of gratitude the mood of being grateful that this wonderful thing has occurred through you or for you or something like that now in homers world that gratitude was typically I take it directed towards an entity the being Athena or the being Zeus or Ares or something like that we want to resist that idea but nevertheless it seems appropriate to us to try to cultivate in ourselves the sense of gratitude that the Homeric Greeks found so natural so that in that epoch a student might find a sense of the sacred in all of its elements even though in the in these works they are relating to gods that are meaningless to us so this is part of what you're trying to do throughout the book let's look at this epic what what really got these people going as they related to the sacred and what by understanding that what is it how can we relate it to today that's what you're trying to that's right yeah and in particular asked what aspects of that can we still appropriate in our world yeah now if in in in understanding these epics you use the term the reconfigures central figures in their time who come along and you you you identify two as one being Jesus and the other Descartes and you say these individuals these extraordinary individuals come along and they are unable to remain embedded in the epic therein they no longer can accept all the terms of the sacred of that epic what do they then do in response to that they they I'm wondering of a loose end that was shown with so much setting up how would you like an example of the pay of a case where the Greek god namely Aphrodite shows up in a way there's not matter that's not metaphysical yeah and out of which we could still learn something and so forth because that's how I got hooked on this 15 years ago right it was I was always sort of reading the margins in between the lines and early on in the Odyssey something very peculiar happens Helen comes back from 10 or 15 years away in Troy with with Paris and she's giving a big banquet for Telemachus this is a son who's visiting that's not important what's important is all the aristocrats are there and Menelaus is there and Helen is telling the story about how she ran off with parents to Troy and that's already pretty strange Menelaus was her first husband yes-man less was about it and then came back to exactly yes and it so how how can we understand this strange behavior well first thought is what she's put drugs in their drinks which she had from the opium from Egypt so that they could hear about the protein war without breaking down in tears for all their dead friends so there they were now but then she tells this story and then what does Menelaus do he says an excellent tale my dear and very becoming and now that is really weird she's just said that she ran off leaving behind them their newborn infant from her husband and he's congratulating her and it could be of course the too much opium but it isn't because at the end of that book of the Odyssey Homer says when when Nana Laius went to bed that night beside him lay Helen law of the long robes peerless among women so Helen is the greater she's also a daughter of Zeus and so how do we understand a culture in which she's the star well then you have to see that what has she got that we can understand though we have trouble would have trouble sharing it and that is an openness to the gods to begin with we got to say a parenthetical the gods are not these figures that's not important the gods are like moods they're the attuning ones according to how we read it and here is Aphrodite a tuning Helen to the app the erotic attractiveness of this situation when Paris this very handsome stranger comes to spend the night at their house and at that point Helen says that she ran off because Aphrodite Sun shined on the throne on the scene what does that mean that means that every egg Aphrodite made it when Aphrodite is around the situation becomes only what is erotic matters not good old stodgy Menelaus and their new baby but Paris the handsome guy and so she is drawn to go off with him and then she leads for a while and intense and the new exciting life in Troy and what are we supposed to get out of that well not that you should run off with your stret with a guest your house guests and having an exciting life not but that you should be open to the possibilities in a situation and that they are sometimes risky and but they are also often exciting and satisfying and meaningful and that's it that so that's what you get you get the idea that the right relation to the divine is openness and receptivity and even if it's risky you do it and that's what Helen did and that's what we can learn to do and then that's another long story how we would learn to do it I want to say that now so so what what you've just given us is an example of how you you take these works and extract from them some piece of the essence that we we need to keep in the back of our mind if we're going to try to work through our present dilemma now we were we were talking about Melville a moment ago and in Melville what you were you were ultimately saying I think in the chapter is that that a hab goes out trying to find the answer the new definition of the sacred and and in the end he he finds that there's nothing basically and so in in that case he is more of a modern man really he really relates to our dilemma and and and so so hence again one can take each one of these and see what the puzzle is place that in the context of the time and then and then move on to the present now I do want to go back to this thing about reconfigures one look with one more thing because they're going to get at one step away and what did I what was why are we looking at they have because he was willful and what did we learn in the from Helen that openness and receptivity is the highest way to relate to the gods so bottom line a hab is not receptive contents who are all for autonomy are not receptive beware of receptivity no don't be where everybody open all sorry to it I just hope they opened it aware of people so we got to watch the time here so what what but what what what you're the other little piece of this and we don't need to go into electing the explanation is that key in this narrative that you're telling which how we wound up where we are now is the notion of the the early the emergence of reconfigures dissatisfied with their time who essentially construct a new way of viewing the world without going into detail Jesus is an example Descartes and I think why that is important is what you're saying is as we deal with the dilemma of our time in a way we have to become reconfigures basically is a police to wreak it yet right but but in our individual life we that that's a good lesson for us we're not going to necessarily reconstruct the the ethos of our time but but we we have to take the autonomy of our time and work with it to come up with some personal notion of the sacred we have to take what's the knowledge autonomy of our time with the little cracks in which receptivity of the erotic sort but also of the sports or tell you where all these receptivity z' come out we have to take them and work with them we have to develop the skill to bring them out and make our life meaningful by way of them that's right and the reconfigure is that same thing writ large where something in the margins of the whole culture you're absolutely right no other review or no else who discusses it never paid any attention to the reconfigures but there what each of these texts is a work of art a work of art is a reconfigure or the Homer changed this world and then Dante changed his world and then so forth anyway and that's very important to see how that's done which is by Jesus and by in a lesser way as you say by an individual who wants to reconfigure their their world Jesus does it by putting down the law which was the big deal thing and substituting this new thing agape love which is this Oh Club again opened a receptive and way of relating to others and so forth and transforms things because what was the central thing namely the law is now still there but only on the margin and what was the marginal thing oh and not to be indulged in was say the all kinds of non legal more receptive and mood light things and those those were on the margin and generally not good like adultery and coveting and so forth but Jesus takes this marginal stuff but not not adultery and coveting but the non but something else a kind of love that is not in in the law and makes it central and changes everything now when you look at the modern era the the example you look at to help us understand where we are and then we will then talk about where you see possibilities for the present era is David Foster Wallace haha temporary writer so so what I want you to explain to our audience is how he provides a window into understanding the really dark side of our city raishin on the one hand but also a possibility for seeing a way out one of the things that I think is really interesting about Wallace who who committed suicide two years ago is that he he his conception of what you could be up to as a writer is a conception that really spoke speaks to me and I think speaks to Byrd I mean it's a conception that we think great writers in the past I've had its the conception of drawing together in your work a total understanding of what the world is about and what the understanding of ourselves could be such that we could we could live lives that are worth aspiring to in our world now to do that you have to be very sensitive to the nature of the world that you live in you have to be a great observer of the world and I think he was a great observer of the world but it's a very difficult task in that context to think up all on your own a way to respond to the threat of nihilism that I think he that I think he identifies as the central threat of the age and so what we try to argue in the chapter on Wallace is that he was incredibly sensitive to this threat that you can see it all throughout his writings that he sees it as a central threat to the you know to the modern person and then he's trying to develop in his characters ways of responding to this threat that are ultimately going to be in some way or another livable and that people themselves could aspire to and what we argue is that at least in one of the threads that you find running through his work there no doubt many authors but at least in one of the threads that you see running through his work the response that he proposes is itself essentially an unlivable response what he says is that it's true that situations present themselves to you in such a way that uh you know you get really angry or really unhappy or they see meaningless or whatever they seem painful they seem awful they seem like they're threatening to you in one way or another but the right response to that is just to recognize that situations have whatever meaning you may you give to them and you can just throw some other meaning onto them and we think that that's really not a livable solution that is the solution that Nietzsche thought we could have it's the solution that Melville explores in a character he called Bulkington who ultimately commits suicide also or at any rate dies in the ocean and and Melville says about Bulkington that he's a demigod that he to the extent that he was able to do this to live in the infinite and give meaning of you know his own sort to anything he was a demigod and I think that's what you would have to be in order to live the life that Wallis seems to be proposing and so that's why he's such a fascinating case and and you quote from Wallace in a Kenyan commencement address and it's sort of an add on to what you just said and he talks about 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 so so in a way so what what this is fascinating and I should say to our audience they really need to read the book because you you know the clarity there we just can't cover it in an hour of conversation but but where we are is we've gone back and looked at some examples where one gets an inkling of an element that might be useful for our times you've helped us understand the the present situation we're in where we can't find the sacred a sacred that helps us choose our meanings so so then the the next step in your work is really to say well let's look around where we are today and and what do we see about where there are some examples of the sacred and it's a it's a strange group of places you look one is a hero in the Sun in a subway the other is a famous basketball player and the third is is a craftsman and so what what is it let's talk about each of those internal but what is it that we can now look at those situations based upon this travel through the past to help us understand the present I think what we're interested in in all three of those cases is the moments in a person's life when they're acting at their best they're doing something that everyone can recognize as extraordinary as admirable as worthy of aspiring to in some way or another and to look in particular at the way at what it feels like to be in those moments and what we want to draw out of each of these kinds of cases is the idea that when you're in those moments it really feels as though the activities being drawn out of you rather than your being the source of the activity so the subway hero Wesley Autrey a guy who who jumped onto the subway tracks in order to save someone who'd fallen there at the very moment that the train was coming into the station and he did it though he had his two young daughters with him on the and and it was an extraordinary act and people asked him afterwards what were you thinking what did you do any and he said over and over again he said I wasn't thinking anything I didn't decide to do anything it just it was just obvious that this had to be done and that feeling of its being just obvious that this happened needs to be done at this moment is a feeling that people can have if they have the right kind of background the right kind of skills and the right kind of openness to what's meaningful in the situation but the idea that those are the things that you need to develop a set of background skills that allow you to be open to what's required in the situation it's just exactly the opposite of Wallace's idea that you need to develop a sense of control over how you determine and decide all on your own what's going to be meaningful regardless of what the situation tells you it's a so Bert keeps saying it and I think it's the thing to emphasize we're trying to pull out of each of these previous epochs a notion a different notion in each of them of a kind of receptivity to what's already meaningful in the situation that we seem no longer to be sensitive to in virtue of the fact that we think meanings in situations come from our own autonomous and subjective choices and from the force of our own individual will so what we have here is a range of possibilities so the the mr. Autry did not train to be a hero it's a spur the moment decision where he is overwhelmed by the situation and he's almost not there because the the situation defines what he's doing Bradley the the senator who was probably the greatest basketball player of his time in college basketball was a person who operated on the field in a similar way but but is a step beyond that because clearly he trained so there was a skill involved but once he had that skill what would happen on the court so in the court I mean it's true that Wesley Autrey didn't train for that moment although it's worth saying I think that he had a sort of military background he had a lot of skills that allowed him to deal with risky and dangerous situations in which people might be in difficulty and so on but right but Bradley is operating in a narrower domain where he trained means like the devil I mean he was famous for his work ethic he worked over and over and over again and what he says about his performance is that is that this the same kind of thing he he experiences himself when he's performing at his best on the basketball court as having his activity drawn out of him as not deciding or determining what the thing is to do but being open to what the situation at this moment demands which is something that someone without his skills couldn't have recognized and and finally what you talk about is the craftsman and as we move along the spectrum of possibilities what what I think you're saying is that here the emphasis is on the craft which creates a niche in which your having been trained and practiced the craft elevates your sensitivity and control to the situation you you lose yourself in a sacred sort of way that's what that's exactly right that we we look at this amazing 19th century writer George Stewart who's been noticed by other people but not so much who was a wheelwright he ran a wheelwright shop and he talks about the craft of being a wheelwright and what he says is that in virtue of the fact that he's got these skills for working with wood and the people who work in his shop have these skills for working with wood they can recognize distinctions of Worth in the environment that are genuinely they're the people without his skills can't see he says I can recognize just by looking that you know this piece of ash is Doty or that this piece of ash is tough as whipcord and he uses these amazing 19th century sort of craftsman lee phrases and i can tell that just by seeing because my hands have had in them built into them skill of sawing by hand through this wood and knowing how these different kinds of wood react to the saw under the hand and when you can recognize those are genuine distinctions of worth you know one piece of wood is just better for something then another piece of wood and he says that when you lose the skills for working with the wood in this really close way when you lose the skills because you've got technology that doesn't need to recognize the difference between where where a knot and a piece of wood is and where it isn't because the technology can just rip right through the knot anyway when you lose this then you lose the skills for recognizing these genuine distinctions of worth and but when you've got a sense for these distinctions of worth it brings about in you a sense that each piece of wood has a kind of personality a kind of character kind of individuality and when you recognize that then you recognize you develop in yourself a sense of he says reverence for the place that it comes from that's that reverence I think is a notion of the sacred that he claims Sturt claims 19th century craftsmen had for the place in which they lived that as a result of the development of technology we no longer have but this sense of reverence I think it's something that you that you really can get I think great musicians have a sense of reverence for the music great athletes have a sense of reverence for the sport and that's why you sometimes see people of great athletes professional athletes reacting in very funny ways when people do something that sort of as sort of according to the internal demands of the sport seems inappropriate where from outside the sport it doesn't seem so inappropriate now in in your discussion of the sacred you emphasize it's kind of within the community that there's a community recognition and I think what am i right in saying that where you're winding up is more in niches that the individual finds him himself in through a craft through training as a sir Virgen and so on and that there is the experience we're looking for of the sacred in that niche now the place interestingly enough where you find this phenomena which I believe you call wishing that that the communal sense of reaction is in which there is a feeling of the sacred is it athletic events and is that that is that fair that's fair although people have made more of this I think then then one wants to make of it what we what we do think is that spectators so we've talked about great athletes who've got lots of skill and so on they can really recognize what needs to be done in a certain situation in a way that others can't and they have the skill to do it but spectators too can have this experience of being receptive to what to what's demanded in a certain situation that we what we think is that this is a very in a certain way a kind of minor form of the of the sacred but it's the form that we have left I think a lot of us it's the one that requires almost no skill whatsoever it's a form of the sacred because in these moments you recognize some activity being drawn out of you that you haven't through your own sense of control or choice determined is going to happen it's when a great event occurs and everyone rises as one and you know in applause for the event but you don't know you'll hardly have to know that the sport at all you could bring your young child there and they'll get excited in the moment they'll recognize it but this notion that in that moment you experience an activity being drawn out of you that doesn't have you as its autonomous and subjective source that's the thing that we want to focus on of course it's also a dangerous for them right in other words you could have this feeling if you were German at a certain time in place at a Nuremberg rally absolutely it's a very dangerous phenomenon so what what we're interested in is focusing on the idea that that phenomenon highlights a notion of receptor pity that stands in contrast to the notion of autonomy and some subjective force of will that's at the center of our understanding of ourselves now but we want to recognize that it's a very dangerous phenomenon and you need to develop some sort of skill for being able to distinguish between those situations in which it's appropriate to allow yourself to be drawn up by by the response of the crowd and those situations in which it's not but what we want to insist that if you just devote yourself to avoiding all of those situations then something important will be lost because you mean all the situations such as going to the Super Bowl yeah all the situations in which you find yourself sort of sensitive to and responding to what the crowd takes to be some great events not just the Super Bowl with Martin Luther King exactly Yeah right Gehrig farewell you make exactly there there are situations in which if you turned your back on them something would really be lost if two hundred thousand people on the National Mall turn their back on Martin Luther King when he was giving his great I have a dream speech say uh and walked away and something important in the culture would have been lost so we think there there is a tendency for people to look at this notion of whooshing and saying it's dangerous you really have to avoid it if you ever found yourself in a situation where you were being drawn up into the crowd that way you want to get out because it's because it could be a Nuremberg rally kind of situation what we think is well yeah but it could be a Martin Luther King situation too if you avoid all of them then the culture will be poorer for it what you really need to do is to develop a skill for distinguishing between the ones that are worth allowing yourself to be drawn up into and the ones that are worth walking away from so so I what I hear you saying in the book in here is another element of why we have to go back in and look at the the classical tradition and the great works is that we're not just retaining the sense of the sacred but also a sense of the values that we have come to that would be a guide in addition to the particular craft that you might adapt so so it's a it's the interface between those two that will keep us from the Nuremberg rallies something like that although I don't know exactly what role the values are playing if they're it's it's a very very difficult question I think what we think although I don't know I'm not sure we're all that clear on it I think what we think is that if value if you substitute for value the notion of a universal and sich a context-free principle then that's not going to do it then that's going to be the kind of thing that closes you off to CID meanings in a situation that are worth being sensitive to rather than in order to get rid of a certain kind of risk what we think is that there aren't probably aren't going to be these universal context-free principles but that doesn't mean that there's not going to be a distinction between the situations that are worth allowing yourself to be drawn into in the situations that aren't it's just that that distinction isn't going to come from some you some context-free principle it's going to come from a kind of sensitivity that you develop through skill one of the things that struck me about your book as I read it was that we went west so to speak backward and west to find this tradition but but but you wound up in the east and by that I mean that what your discussion of craftsmanship and in the whole relationship to a craft it reminded me of the book I knew the Zen of archery so is that is that fair that that in other words although you don't talk about it that that in in a sense you've wound up there in part we I'll say one thing but I want to let Burt I won't hear what bird has to say about this - I just gave a bunch of talks in China a couple months ago and the number of people did say that they found similarities between the kinds of things that I was talking about in this context and a particular Chinese philosopher named Wong Suh whom I don't know very well but they insisted that Heidegger who's a philosopher who were both very interested in it was also very interested in Chong too I don't know much about this but you have things to say about Buddhism I know yeah I have a feeling that though it looks very much like something we're doing if we could read the classics in there and get in sync with the mood that they're what God is showing up for them get a tune it would look a lot not so similar that there are these epics are pretty well unique and different but it would have some big similarity namely receptivity was certainly going to be crucial but is another probably another mode of receptivity well on that note I think we we've given our audience a taste of your book they're going to want to go out and buy it I will show it again to them all things shining and I want to thank Sean and Burke fir for being here today thank you thanks a lot and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 29,190

Rating: 4.7109828 out of 5

Keywords: Hubert Dreyfus, Sean Kelly, secular, nihilism

Id: dxribihEaQI

Length: 57min 31sec (3451 seconds)

Published: Thu May 12 2011