REVIEW ARTICLE OF HUBERT DREYFUS AND SEAN KELLY'S

ALL THINGS SHINING

(with special reference to their treatment of David Foster Wallace)
by Terence Blake
1) LURING BACK THE GODS
ALL THINGS SHINING is an ambitious book, that 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,
the practice of 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 the guidance of
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. This is the explanation of the book's title. However the shining things are
now long gone, 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. 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 ourself be
taken up in the moods we encounter (example: a nonviolent freedom march) and when we should
resist and walk away (example: a Nazi rally): this skill they call "meta-poiesis".

There is something very attractive about the ideas in this book: the pluralism of understandings of
being, the polytheism of moods , 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
new 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 more theological sounding "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.
A last worry is that with their constant evocation of moods that attune a subject and reveal a world
the authors seem to be stuck in what Quentin Meillassoux calls the "correlationist circle", unable to
talk about the world outside its correlation with subjectivity and with a particular understanding of
the world.

It seems that Dreyfus and Kelly are aware of this problem and try to undercut their grand narrative
of a succession of incommensurable understandings of being with a different model based on
Heidegger's notion of a thing thinging. One example that Dreyfus gives in his lectures is that of the
feast in the film BABETTE'S FEAST, a focal event that assembles or gathers together elements in a
way that makes them shine, that brings them out at their best. The polytheism of moods would then
be reinforced by a pluralism of things thinging, but this is left undeveloped in the book. Another
trace of this attempt to maintain the grand narrative and to make room for other ways is the concept
of marginal practices and the things that embody them. One dominant understanding of being is
only a hegemonic rather than a totalitarian paradigm, and each epoch contains many other things,
events, practices as marginal phenomena. This model has the further advantage of making change
conceivable.
The other concept that merits developing is the notion of meta-poiesis which allows us to navigate
between different moods and different understandings, tracing out our own individual path. As such,
it would seem to be the pluralist virtue par excellence. Once again I would put this notion of
metapoiesis in relation with the ability to engage in marginal practices and assemblings, being able
to take things out of their stereotyped uses and set them thinging, thus producing change, and
allowing communication between incommensurable understandings. Dreyfus and Kelly seem to
have realised that they were in danger of expounding an epochal solipsism, and gave indications for
a way of communicating across the barrier of incommensurability. Once again we see, as both
Deleuze and Feyerabend have emphasised, that openness must precede (logically) closedness or we
will never be able to get outside our framework. Finally, for a book whose message is pluralist its
bibliography is surprisingly monist. There is no mention of such pluralist philosophers as Paul
Feyerabend, Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, William Connolly, or Alain Badiou.

As regards Nietzsche, Dreyfus and Kelly seem content to repeat uncritically Heidegger's vision
according to which for Nietzsche once the consequences of the death of God were drawn "the lone
source of meaning in human existence would be the strong individual's force of will" (46). On this
point 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, strong will etc.),
and even “modesty as strength”.

2) ON DAVID FOSTER WALLACE'S SUPPOSED "NIHILISM"

In Chapter 2 of ALL THINGS SHINING (entitled "David Foster Wallace's Nihilism) Dreyfus and
Kelly discuss DFW’s “This is Water” as an example of Wallace's “need to create meaning ex nihilo
out of the individual” (ATS, 204). They find that this project involves a pragmatic contradiction as
being able to create meaning ex nihilo (= ex ego) and impose it on a situation would mean that
anything goes, that any meaning is possible, but only as forced on things by the autonomous
individual’s will. This is an impossible task: it would require the individual to have the inhuman
strength of a solitary god, willing and creating meaning without constraints. For them DFW’s ideal
was to become a monster of self-control (ATS, 44), a master of “exercising control over how and
what you think” (ATS, 38). On this interpretation the key words summing up DFW’s form of
sensibility, or understanding of being, are: autonomous ego, individual, will, force, strength, control,
imposition, difficult task, choice, decision. This is the language of voluntarist nihilism.
What is strange about this interpretation is that it describes exactly the form of sensibility and
possibility of life that Wallace wants to make us clearly and burningly aware of, in THIS IS
WATER, so that we can get out of it, and pursue our individuation according to a quite different
model. This whole text is brimming with intensity and meaning and openness to the world outside
of nihilistic clichés and stereotypes. If you haven’t read it already you should do so at once, it is an
ethical text of great force.
“Force” here means “power to provoke a conversion”, “capacity to produce a transformation”, and
not the compelling power of an individual, able to impose his arbitrary will on himself and on the
world. Wallace does use those key words (“power”, “individual”) or their equivalents all through
“This is Water”, but their sense is somewhat different when considered in terms of the alternative
non-ego-centered form of sensibility that Wallace is trying to sketch out and to get us to adopt.
Wallace is not trying to advocate a new stance inside our current form of sensibility, hence his
repeated insistence that he is not deploying didactic stories or giving edifying moral advice. That
would be an intra-worldly manoeuvre.
Wallace situates himself at the meta-level so as to describe our current nihilistic form of sensibility,
and also a different form of sensibility (or world, or understanding of being, or possibility of life),
one where I am no longer “operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the
world”. Wallace calls the world as viewed and experienced through this egoistic sensibility “the so-
called real world” and wants us to see that living in its terms is a real possibility, but that doing so
will lead us into a state of death-in-life. This is very far indeed from the “need to create meaning out
of the individual’s will” (ATS, 204) that Dreyfus and Kelly find in DFW.
Dreyfus and Kelly, in “All Things Shining”, give several examples of an ethical problem: What is
the appropriate response to the surging up of a pulse of physis such as a great moment in a football
match, the compassion and resistance stirred by a speech by Martin Luther King, the fanatical
hatred in a Hitler rally. They envisage two types of response: let yourself be swept away OR walk
away. Determining which response is appropriate in any given situation is the object of a meta-skill
that they call meta-poiesis. This meta-skill is their response to the “burden of choice” that assails us
in our post-modern secular world: “it resists nihilism by reappropriating the sacred phenomenon of
physis, but cultivates the skill to resist physis in its abhorrent, fanatical form” (ATS, 212). Physis is
an ambivalent phenomenon leading us into a sacred affirmation of life or into its fanatical negation.
We must learn when to “leap in” and when to “walk away”.
Wallace in “This is Water” gives another type of example: the mood of rage and frustration that
whooshes up in a traffic jam or in an overcrowded supermarket. What is the ethical response that
our meta-poiesis can permit in this situation? Wallace is closer to Dreyfus and Kelly than they seem
to think as he proposes a sort of paradigm-change, a transformation in our perception. Faced with
this whooshing up of negativity, do you give in to your “natural hard-wired default setting”, your
certainty that everybody else is just in your way, that only you matter, that everyone else is rude and
obnoxious and repulsive? Or can you use your freedom to rework this natural default setting,
change your paradigm, cultivate a different form of affectivity, perceive people differently and be
affected by them differently? This freedom is the meta-skill to transform our sensibility and to
choose new bifurcations along our path of individuation.
Dreyfus and Kelly don’t see the meta-poietic aspect in DFW’s speech. He is not talking about a new
improved first-level skill in handling people or navigating traffic jams. He is talking about a meta-
skill for resisting being swept away by the whooshing up of negative affects. You can’t just “walk
away” from the overcrowded supermarket or the interminable traffic jam. “Walking away” is not
always possible nor even desirable, and it is an ambiguous solution at best. DFW proposes a
number of what can only be called “spiritual exercises” to allow you to experience the stressful or
enervating situation differently. He suggests imagining another explanation for the behaviour of
those we find obnoxious or infuriating. He is not advocating some sort of voluntary fantasy or
counter-factual ratiocination to alleviate the stress of the supermarket, he doesn’t ask us to imagine
that the repulsive lady screaming at her kids is really a giant squid disguised by a “perception-filter”
(as in a DR WHO episode), but just to consider that she may have been staying up every night with
her husband dying of bone cancer, or something else of the same order of plausibility. The aim is
not to impose an arbitrary meaning by sheer force of will. The aim is to make us aware that
1) meanings are already being imposed on the situation, preventing us from seeing it as it is
2) these already existing meannings can be subsumed under a single paradigm, our hard-wired
default setting of “fear and anger and frustration and worship of the self”
3) other meanings are possible if we open our selves to the multiple field of gods to be worshipped
4) these other meanings can be subsumed under a different paradigm, one not centered around the
ego but based on de-centered attention and caring for others.
DFW wants to free us from our excessive ratiocination, our overintellectualisation, get us out of our
hypnotic state of immersion in and servitude to our internal monologue. He wants to get us out of
our nihilistic understanding of being where we as autonomous individuals each feel we are the
center of the world, and everyone else is a help or a hindrance.
The meta-poiesis that DFW describes subtends a different understanding of being where attention
can dissolve the stereotypes of the nihilist versions of reality and open us to the multiple forms of
the non-nihilistic sacred: “be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess or the Four
Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles”. These are the many gods we can worship
and that give us meaning and life: “pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive”. So
DFW is all for “luring back the gods” to populate “the now egotistical sky”, as Dreyfus & Kelly,
citing Melville, describe their project. The vision that he wishes us to convert to is not one of the
ego-centred individual imposing his choices by sheer will-power, that is the paradigm he wants to
escape from. True, he speaks in terms of “choice”, but this is not egoic volition but rather the noetic
act (to use Bernard Stiegler’s term) of resisting the programmed response to the situation and of
apprehending other ways of perceiving it and acting within it.
Perhaps there is a component of self-defense in Dreyfus and Kelly’s critique of Wallace. After all
DFW's writing does contain an anlysis of the hyper-intellectual reduction of life. A problem with
ALL THINGS SHINING is the nature of its concrete examples. As university professors of
philosophy they are targeted by Wallace, and it is not enough to turn to the opposite pole of physical
accomplishment, whether in sports with Bill Bradley or in heroic rescue with Wesley Autrey if one
wishes to escape from the stultifying dualism of mind and body, or of noesis and physis.

Further, not all depression is a dead-end, yet Dreyfus and Kelly stick to the bright Olympian gods
and do not talk about Saturn and scholarly melancholia. In THIS IS WATER Wallace tries to open
us to others as having their own lives outside their roles as inconveniences or obstacles to our
desires, and all that Dreyfus and Kelly can see is an appeal to will-power. Dreyfus and Kelly have
trouble seeing depression and boredom as intensities, and so associate them with the ego and the
desire to transcend human life and the frustration that this is impossible. The post-Jungian analyst
James Hillman is not so simplistic, and has described the importance of depression and boredom for
deepening our psychic life (cf. REVISIONING PSYCHOLOGY, passim).

Another problem with ALL THINGS SHINING is its appeal almost exclusively to extreme
examples. Meta-poiesis exists in their book when we refuse to give into the hate at a Nazi rally, but
they accuse Wallace of hubristic will when he discusses how not to give in to the anger and
frustration one can feel on a queue at the supermarket. Dreyfus and Kelly, despite their anti-
metaphysical intentions, would seem to be guilty of a metaphysical split manifest in the very type of
extraordinary examples they give. Stanley Cavell’s Emersonian emphasis on a return to the ordinary
is a useful corrective to their obsession with mastery. The coffee-drinking example (p216-219) with
its distinction between ritual and routine is a step in the right direction, and they talk about the
“experimentation” to discover how to bring things out at their best, and thus to respect both the
singularities of the materials and acts comprising the ritual and one’s own singularity.
They contrast the “generic” way of doing where things are treated as exchangeable and meaningful
distinctions are obscured, to a “particular” approach where we “rise up out of the generic and banal
and into the particular and skilfully engaged” (217). So we individuate an activity or domain while
individuating ourselves at the same time. Yet Dreyfus and Kelly, while describing this struggle with
the reign of the stereotype, use a language of uncovering and discovering, and so imply that
meaning is pre-existent rather than emergent.
Further, despite their pluralism and immanence and polytheism of moods, Dreyfus and Kelly have a
one-sided view of intensities or what they call “shining”, a view that excludes the “pathological”
intensities. All this talk of “shining” (really as pluralists they should be saying “shinings”) is
potentially élitist. It most often limited to human excellence as expressed in best case scenarios,
despite their phenomenological orientation. Shining is supposed to be a a descriptive, and not a
normative, notion. One could compare this with Deleuze and Guattari’s cry in ANTI-OEDIPUS:
“Everything must be interpreted in intensity” (p173)
For D&G this is already what Nietzsche and Artaud were doing. And I would add that David Foster
Wallace is engaged in this project of redemption from nihilism, and not, as Dreyfus and Kelly
claim, of its culmination.
If we take this point of view of intensity then we may avoid what threatens to be a form of
hermeneutic nostalgia over the supposed superior inventiveness of the Greeks and of mourning for
the loss of the Greek event. For pluralists like Feyerabend, Deleuze, and Lyotard, our contemporary
time is characterized not by the nihilist condition of the loss of meaning and intensity, but by an
increase of novelty and inventiveness, a surplus of abundance. They refuse to endorse the narrative
of decline that we see at work in ALL THINGS SHINING. To convince us of the contrary we need
only be attentive to the multiplication of invention in the domains the sciences, the arts, politics,
religion, and personal relations. The proper mood is not nostalgia and regret, but openness and
affirmation. The goal is not to “bring back” the shining things, but to be attentive to the shinings
that are already present or being produced.
Mood and concept are closely linked. To dispel one we often have to deconstruct the other. “The
Greeks” is a false unity, a concept that belongs to the dogmatic image of thought. The idea of the
“Greek miracle” cuts them off geographically and chronologically from the multiplicity of sources,
influences, encounters, exchanges, and rivalries. This creates an image of their inventiveness as
stemming from some absolute break and absolute beginning, such that the Greeks become
incommensurable with what went on before and elsewhere. This poses the novelty and
inventiveness of the Greeks as some impossible to attain norm. There seems to be no way that we
can ever make such a leap again, so we are reduced to just adding footnotes to Plato.
“Incommensurability”, however, is not the final word. Beneath the hermeneutic closures and
incommensurabilities lie the pragmatic encounters and exchanges. “The philosphers have always
been something else, they were born of something else”, claim Deleuze and Parnet (DIALOGUES
II, page 74). Michel Onfray develops the same idea for the Greeks: “Protagoras the docker, Socrates
the sculptor, Diogenes the assistant banker, Pyrrho the painter, Aristippus the teacher … are not
professionals of the profession in the postmodern fashion”. This “something else” is not just another
profession, but also another site, the outside with its freedom from the semantic police and the
hermeneutic priesthood. The forum and the agora allowed philosphers to address and discuss with
anyone, as does the blogosphere today (potentially!).
Hermeneutic novelty is often the illusory construct of the retrospective projection of striated
structures onto the past. Pragmatic novelty is far more ambiguous and fluid, tied to the intensive
encounter rather than the regulated exchange. This is why Lyotard too sees no difference between
the ancient Greeks and us, in terms of the withdrawal of Being and the loss of inventiveness:
“Nothing has withdrawn, we have not “forgotten” anything; the ancient Greeks, Heraclitus the in-
between of faith and knowledge, are no more originary than Janis Joplin.”
The comparison with Deleuze (and Guattari) is interesting as I often think of Deleuze and Parnet’s
DIALOGUES II in relation to ALL THINGS SHINING, and of Deleuze’s oft expressed desire to
construct a pop-philosophy – which I think expresses part of Dreyfus and Kelly’s ambition for ALL
THINGS SHINING. Pop-philosophy does not mean a demagogical anti-intellectual hostility to
theory or concepts or erudition, it is philosophy that has an immediate appeal to readers who find
something useful for their lives (and thinking is essential to the human form of life); but it must also
have enough conceptual backbone to make it really a contribution to philosophy and not just
opinionating or free-associating on a theme.
I have been frequenting the two sets of thinkers (Deleuze and Guattari, Dreyfus and Kelly) for some
time now, and the question arises for me of the relation between them, between their respective
philosophical understandings. The relation is clear in terms of my overall project of a diachronic
ontology, of “pluralism and individuation in a world of becoming”: both sets of thinkers are
pluralist; they decenter the subject, its sovereignty and its agency; they give great importance to
affects or moods; they reject the domination of technological rationality; they situate themselves
firmly after the death of God; they seek to go beyond any nihilism that this may be thought to
entail. The points of convergence are many and varied.
ALL THINGS SHINING is quite Heideggerian in orientation and talks in terms of physis, poiesis,
technology, and meta-poiesis. The level of physis involves the "whooshing up" of moods that are
transindividual and that draw people to perceive and to act in certain ways. Poiesis is an affair of
skills that allow us to perceive important distinctions in a material and act on it to bring it out at its
best. Deleuze and Guattari and talk in terms of affects, assemblages, and autopoiesis. The tone is
quite different, being more open and diverse in their bibliographical references and in their
sensitivity to social and political dimensions. The notion of assemblage is used powerfully to
decenter the notion of human agency and distribute it throughout the superordinate groupings or
assemblages of humans and things that “whoosh up”, if you will, perdure and vanish. This is physis
in a deleuzian sense; and I have always found the ALL THINGS SHINING sense too limited, as it
seems to be restricted to the upsurge, perdurance, and vanishment of publicly shared moods and
their associated perceptions and actions. But objects and agents and events are important parts of
the assemblages we confront or belong to.
There seems to me to be a complementarity between the two sets of thinkers that I can bring out in
terms of what I think is a hesitation in Deleuze and Guattari over the meaning of the word “affect”,
which sometimes is closer to physis and sometimes is closer to poiesis. Physis-affect characterises a
plateau of affective tonality, a haecceity, that can last a moment or an afternoon, or several years.
Poiesis-affect characters the powers of being affected (of perceiving differences that matter) and of
affecting (of provoking and revealing differences). The whole notion of skills and crafts that ALL
THINGS SHINING finds so important signals the necessity of a cultivation of affects, of the
discipline of working on our affects to favorise more affirmative, more creative perceptions and
actions. This is a process of individuation, the poietic path of developping one's skills, an
apprenticeship for which, according to Deleuze, “there is no method but only a long preparation”.
3) ADAM S. MILLER'S CRITIQUE: Attention vs Meaning
In December 2011 Adam S.Miller, the author of SPECULATIVE GRACE: Bruno Latour and
Object-Oriented Theology, published a text criticising Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly’s ALL
THINGS SHINING for its misunderstanding of David Foster Wallace, whom, as we have seen,
they accuse of nihilism. Miller accuses Dreyfus and Kelly themselves of nihilism for having based
their argument on the “saving power” of meaning as a remedy against the nihilistic loss of meaning
of the modern world. Such meaning, according to Miller, is a distraction from the real task of
redemption:
“Mythologies (macro-scale meaning-maps) are a byproduct of religion in the same way that stories
are a byproduct of life. This is fine. But our stories are not alive and our maps are not the way. It’s a
mistake, I think, to think that religions are in the business of making meaning”.
While I fully agree that Dreyfus and Kelly give a reading of David Foster Wallace's work that is
demonstrably wrong, I think Miller was a little severe in his treatment of their general project in
ALL THINGS SHINING. Despite applying their concepts erroneously in their discussion of
Wallace, they do give great philosophical importance to DFW's essays and novels, and even when
they criticise him they are using his values and ideas (often without even realising it). Their notion
of “meaning” is not one of reference, or even of signification, but is rather like Bruno Latour’s
notion (in REJOICING) of religion as conversion to an attitude of attention to the things that are
near us.
It must be remarked that in Latour’s scheme in AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE
myth would seem to correspond to the mode of existence of "beings of metamorphosis", of those
beings (divinities, ghosts, ancestors, emotions, archetypal images) that are formative of the psyche,
whereas religion is a mode that constitutes us as persons. Myths give us meaning and psyche,
religion gives us attention and personhood. Myth, magic, affect and fantasy can transform us,
whereas religion is a matter of love and conversion. I do not fully agree with this schema, but I can
see its motivating force. My own dissenting view is that, while there is surely a difference between
myth and religion, even in the very refined forms that Latour and Dreyfus and Kelly propose to
analyse them, both of these are sub-modes of a more general mode that could be called the mode of
individuation.
Whatever one may think of this last point I was struck in reading the interview with David Foster
Wallace published under the title QUACK THIS WAY, by how all his advice on writing was the
exact opposite of Drefus and Kelly’s interpretation of Wallace. In ALL THINGS SHINING they
claim that Wallace was trapped in the autonomous ego and its masterly will. Yet in QUACK THIS
WAY, as in THIS IS WATER, Wallace is full of advice about how to avoid taking oneself to be the
centre of the universe and how to stop using writing as a narcissistic monologue that reinforces
one's confinement in the ego's illusions of self-sufficiency. The aim of writing for Wallace is
encounter, conversation, exchange and the adventures of dialogue.
The connection between David Foster Wallace and Bruno Latour seems direct in this case. DFW too
wants to provoke a “conversion” away from the ego and towards the world around us, and to that
extent his work is religious in scope.
4) NON-THEISTIC GRATITUDE
ALL THINGS SHINING is a text of pluralist phenomenology and ontology that proposes many
interesting ideas and analyses. However it contains some ambiguous formulations, and needs to be
protected from possible theological co-optation. What is at stake is the occasional importation into
the immanent phenomenological perspective and descriptions of transcendent ontological
assumptions by means of theistic or “believerly” language that has ontotheological rather than
phenomenological import.
This can be illustrated in Dreyfus and Kelly’s analysis of the “event” in Pulp Fiction where Jules
and Vincent are left unscathed after being shot at (p68-72). Surprisingly, Dreyfus and Kelly come
down in favour of Jules’ reaction, despite its being factually false. (He speaks of “divine
intervention” and specifies: “God came down from Heaven and stopped the bullets”). The important
issue for them is not factual but phenomenological. They say: “gratitude is the more fitting
response”. I think they should have said “non-theistic gratitude is the more fitting response”.
Otherwise, they seem to be committed to saying that a creationist is right despite his false beliefs
about evolution (and his reactionary politics!), as long as he feels gratitude at the miracle of human
life.
Non-theistic gratitude is a gratitude at the abundance of the world and of its events, an affirmation
of what happens without any idea of providence or other transcendence. It is what Nietzsche names
amor fati, and Dreyfus and Kelly name the “gift without a giver”: “the Greeks felt that excellence in
a life requires highlighting a central fact of existence: wonderful things outside your control are
constantly happening for you (ALL THINGS SHINING, 73).
I must admit that at first I was hostile to this idea of a “gift without a giver”. My argument was that
this was bad phenomenology, that the phenomenon was not being experienced or not being
described in a pure state, because the very notion of the event as “gift” and of the appropriate
response as “gratitude” seemed suspect to me, contaminated by the theistic connotations of these
two words, as implying necessarily a “giver” of the event, whether one consciously intends the
implication or not. I became reconciled to this vocabulary when I came upon the more explicit
formulation “nontheistic gratitude” in the work of William Connolly. In “The Ethos of
Pluralization” Connolly talks about a third possibility outside the theistic and secular belief systems,
which he calls “postsecularism”. In his explication, postsecularists comprise “numerous agents of
resistance to the monotheisms and monosecularisms” who “define themselves—retrospectively, as
it were—as carriers of nontheistic gratitude for the rich diversity of being.” (p190).
What bothers me about Dreyfus and Kelly’s analysis of Jules’ reaction is that they separate
cognitive (or at least ideational) aspects of his experience from some pure affective or emotive core,
and then proceed to endorse the emotive core of the experience, in this case “gratitude”, while
rejecting the cognitive component as just an “attempt at justification”. I don’t think a mood can
exist as a pure emotive state. Rather it includes conceptual, affective, linguistic, and practical
elements.
I still think Dreyfus and Kelly are being unfair to Vincent, as his remark (“this shit happens”) could
be seen as a Lucretian endorsement of physis as against Jules’ theos. In their own descriptions of the
multiple understandings of being they contrast Heidegger’s view on the succession of epochs with
Hegel’s view, declaring that for Heidegger there is no “why”. This sounds to me as if they are
maintaining that Heidegger is like Vincent, and “there is no why” is similar in meaning to “this shit
happens”.
However, to adjudge the victory to Jules or to Vincent is to oppose them inside a commensurable
field, and such a victory is empty. For me the force of ATS lies in its attempt to describe and exhibit
incommensurable understandings of being. Unfortunately, I think that Dreyfus and Kelly pose a
normative overlay to this descriptive task, and so I accuse them of doing “normative
phenomenology”. I do not wish to oppose a Lucretian Vincent to a Heideggerian Jules, and I don’t
think that this distribution of roles and understandings exhausts the conceivable possibilities.
Rather, I think that a third way can be articulated, outside this dualism, one of seeing the event as an
occasion for metapoiesis, so maybe there is no need to presuppose one unique response. A
metapoietic Jules would allow himself to be perfused with gratitude without affirming, or even
feeling, that God stopped the bullets. A metapoietic Vincent could resist one form of the affect of
gratitude as being too entangled with theistic sentiments, without refusing gratitude absolutely.
“This shit happens” could be a Lucretian enunciation of opennes to and gratitude for the abundance
of Nature, the affirmation that the world contains many wondrous combinations.
However, I cannot accept D&K’s solution as it stands. They operate by extracting and
decontextualizing from Jules’ theistic perception of the event the pure affect of gratitude that they
valorize when it occurs in quite other contexts. My feeling is that this gratitude is somehow a cliché
closing Jules off from the encounter with the world, a stereotyped version of the affect. This is why
I embraced Connolly’s notion of nontheistic gratitude. But perhaps by still calling it “gratitude” I
am implicitly accepting the validity of this extraction of affects and their reappropriation in other
contexts. The problem is to determine whether there is a living affect in the cliché or if it is a
caricature all the way down.

5) DOES ALL THINGS SHINING ESCAPE FROM ONTOTHEOLOGY?

“Ontotheology” means positing a (usually unitary) transcendence outside and ruling over an
immanent field. This is a structural categorization: there is no need for the transcendent element to
be explicitly religious. For example, some forms of humanism have been called “theological”
because they abolish God but they put “Man” in the same foundational role, so the same structure as
theistic religious belief is conserved. Scientism is another.Going on from there, various authors
have indicated that notions of a unitary subject confronting a purely objective world, or of a unitary
world as ultimate thing-in-itself are theological.
On a first reading, ATS is compatible with this kind of tracking down of, discarding, and creatively
going beyond theological presuppositions. The Deleuzian “evil trinity” of God, Subject, World is
overcome. From the beginning the context is after the death of God, and the phenomenological
descriptions are, and have to be “methodologically atheist”. The Subject has at least been attenuated
by the critique of the autonomous individual and its closure, by a revision in terms of openness. The
World has been reworked in terms of different worlds associated to diverse understandings of being,
and these in turn as epochal configurations of gatherings of practices. Yet, problems persist. Unities
are posited and made use of, but are found to lead to difficulties.
Some possible ontotheological residues in the ALL THINGS SHINING experience:
1) Recourse to descriptive terms containing theological connotations
the use of so-called “phenomenologically appropriate” descriptive terms such as “gift” (under
erasure, as it is “without a giver”) and “authority” (under erasure, as of course there is no giver of
orders beyond or behind the authority-effect). These terms have personological connotation, even if
that is not ther intention
2) Ontotheolical reduction of the pluralist semantic field: the primacy of “authority”
the book uses a plurality of positivity-laden terms: intensity, meaning, certitude, being in the zone,
openness, mattering, worth, shining things, sacred things. This democratic semantic plurality is
sometimes simplified in the discussion in an oriented way privileging for example “sacred” over
other possible predicates. This is a theocratic reduction of the semantic field. Similarly, in the book
the word “authority” is used only five times. In his interviews Sean Kelly uses it far more often.
This usage of “authority” is ambiguous between an immanent and a transcendent acception of the
term. The expression “extra-human authority” is quite compatible with an immanent interpretation,
but one may regret the personological connotation of “authority” – there remains a whiff of God’s
commanding in this word. Deleuze, in a similar context, talks of an impersonal “power”, but this is
almost as unsatisfactory. The problem here is at least in part an artefact of the translation into
English. Deleuze has devoted many pages to the reworking and creative explicating of the notion of
power as “puissance” (power as capacity), and to distinguishing it from that of “pouvoir” (power as
constraint exercised over another). Kelly and Dreyfus have not done a similar reworking of the
notion of “authority” (and its use as integral to the ALL THINGS SHINING project calls out for
explication).
3) ALL THINGS SHINING AS “POP-PHILOSOPHY”
The comparison with Deleuze is interesting as Deleuze and Parnet’s DIALOGUES II repeats
Deleuze’s oft expressed desire to construct a pop-philosophy – which I think expresses part of
Dreyfus and Kelly’s ambition for ATS. As their indications of the Heideggerian underpinnings of
the book shows, pop-philosophy does not mean a demagogical anti-intellectual hostility to theory or
concepts or erudition. Pop-philosophy has an immediate appeal to readers who find something
useful for their lives (and thinking, as your fifth case of truth establishing itself recalls, is essential
to the human form of life); but it must also have enough conceptual backbone to make it really a
contribution to philosophy and not just opinionating or free-associating on a theme. These
indications of the conceptual underpinnings of ATS and of their own interventions are welcome
reminders that they are not just spouting opinions off the top of their head, but articulating clearly
and creatively a long path of philosophical investigations.
3) Remythologisation is an ambiguous move
the exception made in the case of Jesus, treated as himself a work of art. I know “Jesus” is under
erasure as Dreyfus and Kelly are referring to the character as presented in the Gospels (which is just
as well as there is no reason to believe that such a person ever existed). In that case they should
have taken the Gospels as the work of art. Their “deduction” of the Trinity from their tripartite
ontological schema involving background practices, an exemplar, and articulator(s) is particularly
off-putting, and brings them very close to Zizek’s Christian atheism. It makes me wonder whether
their vocabulary of openness, meaning, wonder etc is a set of partial synonyms for Paul Tillich’s
notion of “ultimate concern”, a sort of de-mythologised ontotheology.
4) Reduction of all cases of “bad” to adhesion to the autonomous ego
Dreyfus and Kelly’s contrast between those who believe that there is no meaning in the world aside
from what we put in to it and those who are open to meanings that are already there in the situation
is too Manichean. The bad guys are always the autonomous ego guys, from Penelope’s suitors to
Ahab to poor DFW (which pokes a big hole in their thesis of the incommensurability of epochs). I
think Ahab is not a case of the (self-)destructive power of the autonomous will, but rather, as some
aspects of their analysis suggest, he is a case of the destructive power that openness to and espousal
of perceptions and pulsions of physis can (but not necessarily) have on the territorialising values of
poietic nurturing i.e. of physis overwhelming an ego unprotected by by metapoiesis.
5) Unifying commensuration is theological
first the different understandings of being are posed as each regenting totally an epoch and as
mutually incommensurable. This leads to a strong thesis that there is no overarching instance that
would explain the historical succession of worlds (this is just as well, because such an overarching
explanatory instance would be theological). However, there are similarities and contrasts between
the diverse worlds, and the whole point of talking about them in ATS is to find features and aspects
that are of current relevance. This implies some form of commensuration, which Dreyfus and Kelly
spell out in terms of a dominant majoritarian gathering of practices and of various marginal
practices. This view is a provisional compromise: he notion of unitary epoch is itself theological.
Heidegger himself implicitly critices his “work of art” paradigm as still theological when he moves
on to his “thing thinging” paradigm. ATS is an unstable half-way compromise between the
macroscopic “work of art” paradigm (still fairly structuralist) which functions as a useful first
approximation and the the more accurate micro-account of the thing thinging (which is in fact one
of things thinging, the plural is important as ratifying more clearly the intra-epochal plurality).