Skills Without Values, Rallies Without Virtues: Beyond Hipster Heideggerianism and Shining Things

Abstract

Hubert Dreyfus’s and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s All Things Shining represents one of the most influential articulations of religious naturalism in recent memory and an important vision of the future of philosophy, religion, and their intersection. An extremely popular book that also strives for philosophical seriousness, it proposes a non-supernatural polytheism that celebrates a diverse array of “shining things” as antidote to a nihilism that the authors allege infests contemporary life. We can “lure the gods back” by cultivating skills and opening ourselves to the ecstasy of communal transcendence, a suggestion all the more relevant given the recent rise of global populism. I contend that Dreyfus’s and Kelly’s vision falls short in each dimension of its effort to re-enchant the world: its account of human attunement to value, which attunement they regard as chief among shining things (e.g. an elite basketball pro “playing out of his mind”); its confusion of mere skill or poiesis with virtue; and its proposed solution to the ethical dangers inherent in “whooshing up” or physis and the lack of critical distance they imagine that such experiences require. I close by suggesting that an Emersonian religious naturalism represents a more intellectually coherent and ethically salutary alternative for “religious nones.”.