Garry Wills NYRB piece on 'All Things Shining'

I came across Garry Wills New York Review of Books review of ATS last night. He pretty much hated it. "It is written by well-regarded professors," he says "(one of them the chairman of the Harvard philosophy department). This made me rub my eyes with astonishment as I read the book itself, so inept and shallow is it." I'll leave it to you to read the rest of the review. Now I don't want to oversell Dreyfus's and Kelly's book, because I think its objectives are fairly modest. But I think Wills's misreading of it is hilarious. It's a classic case of someone who plows in one field being incapable of understanding the work being done in another.

In the  Styles of Thinking diagram (see below) I discussed in my last post, I used Kelly and Dreyfus as examples of Q1 thinking. Wills is an example of mid-Q4 thinking.  He's an American liberal Catholic plowing in the field of Enlightenment-rationalist scholarship. Dreyfus and Kelly are Heideggerians who are attempting to make Heidegger accessible to a broader audience. If you don't understand or care about the post-Nietzschean problems that Heidegger is trying to solve, chances are you are not going to be interested or understand what D&K are doing. The culture is inundated with pop-Nietzschean, self-absorbed subjectivism, and this intelligent and well informed pop-Heideggerian attempt to break out of the subjectivist box is a refreshing and welcome relief.

I'm not saying that Wills's critique has no merit if you understand where he's coming from.  But I think it's fair to say that Wills doesn't have a clue what the book is really about or trying to do. And it probably shows the cluelessness of the Q4 NYRB sensibility that the editors there would give the book to Wills to review in the first place. They probably thought that, what with him being a Catholic and all, it's his kind of thing. But Q4 American liberal intellectuals are still very pre-Nietzschean in their sensibility, and someone like Wills is very much shaped by that sensibility. 

Wills most likely thinks that the old things, the Enlightenment things and Catholic things, still play essential roles in our civilization because for him they still do. I get that because they play that role for me too. But I don't make the mistake I think he and other Q3 and Q4 people make in thinking that because these old, valuable things play this role for me, that if more people would just think like me, that would solve their nihilism problem. The fact is that Wills represents a moribund, minority position in the culture at large, and lots of people, especially young people, if they think about these issues at all, look at Wills and the style in which he writes this review as being over the top for its learned, pompous cluelessness.

D&K are thoroughly post-Nietzschean in their sensibility. They are extraordinarily learned but extraordinary also for their modesty. They are very familiar with and clearly appreciate all the things that Wills and I value, but they would argue, and I would agree, that they don't signify and can't signify to the culture at large in the way they used to. So they want to start out fresh, and so the mood of their book (and of their lectures if you listen to them) is modest, exploratory, and collaborative.

In Q3 you have to meet certain standards of rigor; in Q1 the task is more tentative and experimental. Wills's world is well traveled and well understood--and, except in the subjective experience of a few well-educated dead-enders, dead. D&K's world is terra incognita, and into it they are taking baby steps. And I doubt the authors would claim more for their book than that.

Their quoting Melville here pretty much sums up the modesty of their project because in the end it comes down to gratefulness for what is near at hand. That is a very good beginning for anyone in a post-NIetzschean mindset who is looking to break out of the subjectivist box in finding signifiers, homely as they might be, of transcendence, or existentialized grace:

I have perceived that in all cases man must lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country. (ATS p. 163)

I do not accept this as a final statement, but rather as a honest, modest beginning; it's something to build from.

Here's the Styles of Thinking diagram referred to above:

 

Comments

[Jack Whelan]

Kelly in his book blog http://allthingsshiningbook.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/garry-wills-really-did-not-like-our-book/#comments refers readers to this my defense of his book here, even though he says he doesn't understand it.

There's another extended discussion of Wills's review here: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2011/03/garry-wills-did-not-like-whooshing-up.html

There are many reasons why Kelly doesn't understand my defense, the most likely being that he cannot accept my admittedly peculiar Christocentric view of history and of my way of locating where his book fits into it. That's ok.

Their book is not intended for a scholarly audience, and so it eschews all the scholarly apparatus and hairsplitting that scholarly types love, but in the end either you get what they're trying to do or you don't. I have my quibbles with this point they make or another, but whether their reading of Dante or John's Gospel or Homer reflect the scholarly consensus is a secondary concern, because what they are trying to do doesn't depend on whether enlightenment rationalist types agree with their reading of them or not.

That's not their audience, and it's ok because that audience and its mindset have no future. The enlightenment model is a rickety old habit that persists because nothing robust enough has come along to blow it down. I think what D&K are doing is an attempt to prepare the mainstream for a way of thinking that will eventually blow that old mindset away, and in doing so they are opening up a space that will have enormous possibilities for the creation of something new.

[Tom]

Hi there. Um, you don't actually address Wills' criticism. You say that Wills is 'Q4', without actually addressing Wills' specific points.

For example, at one point Wills notes that the book says "Augustine was the first important Christian to interpret Christianity using the categories of Greek philosophy". Wills says that Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and others were important Christians who did this before Augustine.

Is Wills right or wrong? Saying that Wills is 'Q4', and 'Catholic' (three times), is just a personal attack. You say he's a liberal Catholic. You're aware that he claims to say the Rosary every day, and started off with William F. Buckley? Could he possibly be more complex than to be simply dismissed as a liberal Catholic?

We'd never know from your critique, with respect. You quote Wills' first paragraph, then say "I'll leave it to you to read the rest of the review". Did you read the rest of the review? Or had you already made up your mind that "Wills represents a moribund, minority position in the culture at large", and so doesn't deserve further consideration? And what's "learned ... cluelessness"? Isn't that a contradiction?

[Jack Whelan]

Tom--

I think that Wills is a very smart guy who has completely misunderstood the book--it doesn't fit into his template for what a good book should do, so he dismisses it for reasons that tell us more about him than they do about the virtues or vices of the book. That's what I mean by learned cluelessness. I think the reason he has misunderstood the book is because it's attempting to answer questions he doesn't really have because his mindset is pre-Nietzschean.

I'm a Catholic too, and there's a lot I disagree about in this book, but I respect what they're trying to do, and Wills just doesn't because it's clear to me that he doesn't understand what they're doing. And I argue that he doesn't understand what he's doing because his mindset prevents him from doing so. That's all I'm saying, and that's where Q4 Q1 thing comes in. It's an attempt to explain different mindsets. Take it for what it's worth; I'm sorry if that's not helpful for you.