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Nietzsche thought that nihilism was a great joy, since it frees us to live any life we choose, but many find it horrifying instead. As Dostoyevsky puts it, “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.”
To control your thoughts about others, about the unpleasant features of the situation you are now in, about whatever it is at this very moment that is causing you unhappiness—to do this is difficult. It takes effort and will, and sometimes you simply can’t manage.
But it is a possibility, according to Wallace. And not just any possibility but the possibility; the saving possibility for modern life. “[M]ost days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently” at the situation, he tells us.
If you really learn how to pay attention … [i]t will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Of course, as Dostoyevsky suggested in The Brothers Karamazov, if there is no God then everything is permitted.
Nietzsche’s world had not declined so far. Nineteenth-century European culture on the whole still took for granted that the Judeo-Christian virtues were not only proper but sanctioned by God. Nietzsche could see that this was changing, that the background practices of the culture were pulling away from their supports, but he believed that the full transformation of the culture was still far in the future. Even so, he shared with Wallace the nihilistic idea that, once that transformation had finally occurred—as it has in Wallace’s world—the lone source of meaning in human existence would be the strong individual’s force of will.
The “free spirit” is Nietzsche’s name for the individual who lives properly after the death of God. This free spirit is no longer constrained by any external norms at all for what it is appropriate or permissible to do. It is literally true for the free spirit, as Dostoyevsky worried it would be, that since there is no God, everything is permitted. Nietzsche—perhaps wriggling free from the overbearing constraint of a father and two grandfathers who held important positions in the Lutheran church—saw this as a joyous possibility indeed.
A]nd the big idea was let’s put the individual human being at the center of the universe above all gods and mysteries. … And it’s the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius.
This is the real problem, she says. Because if it is the writer’s individual genius that is fully responsible for the character of the work, then the pressure to re-perform is immense and constant. Not only is one’s entire worth and identity at stake in the outcome, but no individual success can ever assure it either: it is always possible that the next book will show the earlier success to have been a fluke.
When she was growing up in rural Virginia, [Stone] would be out working in the fields, and … she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. … It was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her … And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page.
This idea of the poem as an external force, something wandering the world looking for a receptacle, a place to reside, is Gilbert’s Lutheran ideal; it is what she thinks can save great artists from the destructive force and the dark times, from drinking gin at nine o’clock in the morning. As in the case of Luther, to get this understanding of the human being as writer requires a Gestalt shift, a shift that turns what was an onerous, pressure-filled, probably inachievable task into something that is entirely outside the artist’s realm of responsibility. It is not clear that this is a reason for the truth of the view, but it is at least Gilbert’s instrumental reason for wanting to believe it. About Wallace’s Nietzschean-type approach she says
I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. You know, I think that allowing somebody … to believe that he or she is … the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It’s like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.
The idea that we must “become gods ourselves” as Nietzsche says,48 that we must become the source of all “divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery,” this dramatically self-aggrandizing view was indeed prefigured by the Renaissance notion of genius—and of rational humanism more generally. And we think Gilbert is right to resist it. It’s not just too much responsibility for the human psyche, as she points out, but it’s probably inconsistent with what are deeply human kinds of comfort and happiness too, as we will see in Melville. So on this issue we side with Gilbert over Wallace.
The best kind of life in Homer’s world is to be in sync with the gods. As Martin Heidegger puts it:
[W]e are thinking the essence of the [Homeric] Greek gods … if we call them the attuning ones.5
At the center of Homer’s world, then, is the sense that what matters is already given to us, and that the best life is the one that manages to get in sync with it. This vision speaks eloquently to our own modern needs. Homer’s Olympian gods give his Greeks a sense of the sacred that underwrites the joys and sorrows of a truly meaningful existence. To lure back these Homeric gods is a saving possibility after the death of God: it would allow us to survive the breakdown of monotheism while resisting the descent into a nihilistic existence.
What makes Helen great in Homer’s world is her ability to live a life that is constantly responsive to golden Aphrodite, the shining example of the sacred erotic dimension of existence. Likewise, Achilles had a special kind of receptivity to Ares and his warlike way of life; Odysseus had Athena, with her wisdom and cultural adaptability, to look out for him. Presumably, the master craftsmen of Homer’s world worked in the light of Hephaestus’s shining. In order to engage with this understanding of human excellence, we will have to think clearly about how the Homeric Greeks understood themselves. Why would it make sense to describe their lives in relation to the presence and absence of the gods?
The nihilism of our secular age leaves us with the awful sense that nothing matters in the world at all. If nothing matters then there is no basis for doing any one thing over any other, and the contemporary burden of choice weighs heavily.
HOMER DESCRIBES AN ARRAY of situations in which something outside our control evokes, or ought properly to evoke, a kind of amazement and gratitude from us. When a stranger offers assistance, on Homer’s account, it is almost always a god or goddess in disguise;18 when, in a particularly critical instance, someone’s speech moves the public to your side, that, too, is a god or goddess looking over you.19 Even when men are gathered at a council—if it really matters and everyone shows up—Homer cannot resist the idea that a god or goddess did the job.20 To say this is not to engage in any fancy metaphysical claims. After all, in each of these cases a real person—the stranger, the public speaker, the herald—is involved as well. Rather, to say that a god is behind each event is to emphasize that gratitude and amazement are the appropriate response.
The Greek word for grace here is charis, which is the root for our word charismatic. Literally a charismatic person is one who has been favored by the gods with a gift of grace or talent.
ONE DOES NOT have to believe that the Greek gods actually exist in order to gain something deep and important from Homer’s sense of the sacred. One does, however, have to reject the modern idea that to be a human agent is to be the sole source of one’s actions. Because this modern notion of human agency is so pervasive, it can lead us to act in ways that hide the phenomena that Homer was sensitive to.
The job of a work of art is to disclose a world, give meaning, and reveal truth. In this sense, works of art working can be thought of as sacred. They give meaning to people’s lives and people guide their lives by them, so people treat them as divine. They venerate them like gods and make shrines dedicated to them. That is what happened to the Odyssey, the Oresteia, and The Divine Comedy. Each of these texts was venerated as sacred by those in the world it illuminated. In this way artworks can play the traditional role of a god. They are a nonhuman authority that gives meaning and purpose to those whose lives are illuminated by them.
In Kant’s view the subject replaces God as the orderer of the world. Kant argued famously that Enlightenment means learning finally to take responsibility for your own actions. In other words, the maturity that comes with Enlightenment requires me to obey the Pope or the King only if I freely choose to do so. Autonomy, or setting up one’s own laws and choosing to act in accordance with them—the ultimate sinfulness of the souls in Dante’s Dis—now becomes the highest human good.
Existentialism,” Sartre writes, “places the entire responsibility for [man’s] existence squarely upon his own shoulders.”36
“A rich reality is needed to sponsor a sense of community,” Borgmann writes.
A thoughtful and graceful ballpark tunes people to the same harmonies. It inspires common pride and pleasure, a shared sense of season and place, a joint anticipation of drama. Given such attunement, banter and laughter flow naturally across strangers and unite them into a community. When reality and community conspire this way, divinity descends on the game, divinity of an impersonal and yet potent kind.7
Nietzsche said that the sacred is whatever it is in a culture at which one cannot laugh. One can laugh, of course, at the spectacle of grown men trying to hit a hard ball with a wooden stick, or carry a spheroid across a line. It is not that sports are sacred to the culture in any absolute sense. But there are moments in sport—either in the playing of them or in the witnessing of them—during which something so overpowering happens that it wells up before you as a palpable presence and carries you along as on a powerful wave. At that moment there is no question of ironic distance from the event. That is the moment when the sacred shines.
You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or to try to define it in terms of what it is not.
This glancing approach is inclined toward reconciliation instead of purification. It involves a fully human notion of the sacred that lives not in the repudiation or transcendence of pain and boredom and anger and angst, but rather in the recognition that these difficult aspects of our existence live together with the sacred moments, that they complete one another, and make sense of one another. It is a notion of the sacred that is reconciled with the idea that you cannot have gods that care about you without having gods that sometimes get angry as well.13
The task of the craftsman is not to generate the meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill for discerning the meanings that are already there.
WILD, ECSTATIC PHYSIS is the sacred realm of meaning still evident today, gentle, nurturing poiesis is a dying art. In part this is the result of our own success: advances in technology have diminished the importance of specialized skills in contemporary life. Indeed, perhaps the central goal of modern technology is to make every domain accessible to everyone, no matter what his or her level of skill. “Even a child can do it!” is the mantra of the technological age. To cook a meal is to press a button, to travel across the country is to step on a plane. To navigate an unfamiliar terrain is to turn left or right whenever the Global Positioning System (GPS) says. Technology improves our lives by making hard things easier. That is a basic axiom of the contemporary world.
But the improvements of technology are impoverishments as well. The GPS covers over the meaningful distinctions that the art of skilled navigation revealed. To the extent that technology strips away the need for skill, it strips away the possibility of meaning as well. To have a skill is to know what counts or is worthwhile in a certain domain. Skills reveal meaningful differences to us and cultivate in us a sense of responsibility to bring these out at their best. To the extent that it takes away the need for skill, technology flattens out human life.
Take the GPS, for example. There is something convenient about this device with which you are never lost. Occasionally, of course, it tells you to take a sharp right turn when you are in the middle of a long bridge. But this kind of inadequacy will soon be ironed out. For those of us who are directionally challenged (and both authors count ourselves among this group) the GPS seems to offer a great technological advance.
But notice the hidden cost to this advance. When the GPS is navigating for you, your understanding of the environment is about as minimal as it can possibly be. It consists of knowing things like “I should turn right now.” In the best case—and we want to take the best case here—this method of navigating gets you to your destination quickly and easily. But it completely trivializes the noble art of navigation, which was the province of great cultures from the seafaring Phoenicians to the navigators of the Age of Discovery. To navigate by GPS requires no sense of where you are, no sense of where you’re going, and no sense whatsoever for how to get there. Indeed, the whole point of the GPS is to spare you the trouble of navigating.
But to lose the sense of struggle is to lose the sensitivities—to landmarks, street signs, wind direction, the height of the sun, the stars—all the meaningful distinctions that navigational skill reveals. To navigate by GPS is to endure a series of meaningless pauses at the end of which you do precisely what you are told. There is something deeply dehumanizing about this: it’s like being the central figure in a Beckett play without the jokes. Indeed, in an important sense this experience turns you into an automated device the GPS can use to arrive at its destination. This is one of the ways the world can be, and at times it is the best the world can be. But to aim for this as an entire way of life is to lose touch with the skill and care, the reverence and awe, that are some of the moods that bring out human beings at their best.
There are a wide variety of domains worth caring about and there are no objective, context-independent principles for determining which domains these are. You just have to try it out and see. Some people care about mathematics, others about music, some prefer baseball and others bullfighting. Some prefer drinking a local wine with their friends. Whether a domain is worth caring about is determined by whether it appropriately elicits further and further meaningful involvement with it.
Because there are no objective rules about this, one must constantly be open to the possibility that the domain to which one is drawn will reveal itself as too brutal or too trivial or too isolating or too dull or in some other way inappropriate for bringing out everything at its best. One must be prepared, as Helen was, to regret having been drawn into such a world and to allow oneself to be drawn to a more rich and meaningful one. This risk of regret is the risk associated with everything meaningful, a risk without which our lives would descend to meaninglessness and boredom, expressionlessness and angst.
THE INTENSE AND MEANINGFUL world of Homer’s Greeks evidently shone with sacred force. Our technological world, by contrast, seems impoverished and dull. We cannot return to Homer’s world, and we should not hope to do so. But we can become receptive to a modern pantheon of gods—to the ways in which Gehrig and Federer shine, the ways in which Marilyn Monroe or Albert Einstein changed how we see the world in which we live. And we can also lure back the gods of old—the great works that were venerated once before and now can be re-experienced in their sacred worth. To do this requires more than simply canonizing these works on reading lists and classroom syllabi. It requires developing the skills for responding to the manifold senses of the sacred that still linger unappreciated at the margins of our disenchanted world.
These notions of the sacred are richer and more varied than anything Homer ever knew. For his gods shared a common style; they literally had a family resemblance with one another. Whether it was Aphrodite’s sacred erotic world or Ares’s sacred world of war, Athena’s world of practical wisdom or Hephaestus’s world of beautifully wrought, shining things, the sacred worlds of all the Homeric gods had something in common: they whooshed up like a wave and carried one for a while, before finally losing power and letting one go. This sense of the sacred as physis is still available at the margins of our culture today, but it is not the only kind of sacred open to us.
In addition to physis, we also have a poietic conception of the sacred that was completely absent in Homer’s age, a sense of being able to cultivate the world, to develop the skills needed to bring it out at its shining best. This poietic understanding of the sacred comes in many forms. Whether it is Jesus’ sense that the world is best revealed through the light of His mood of agape love, or Dante’s sense that we can teach ourselves the skill to be receptive to the love that moves the sun and the other stars; whether it is Aeschylus’s sense that we can bring out the culture at its best by finding an appropriate place for all its nascent forces or Sturt’s sense that we can dwell in a natural world of sacred worth, these poietic accounts of the sacred are gentle and nurturing in a way that was alien to Homer’s world.
And in addition to all these accounts of the sacred, we also have a technological conception of the world, an efficient and resourceful understanding of things that allows us to produce and control what is. The world is this way too at times—not sacred but devoid of intrinsic worth, ready to be molded to our desires and will.
The practices have gathered throughout the history of the West to reveal these manifold ways the world is. Perhaps there are other ways the practices have gathered too. But only now, released from the ancient temptation to monotheism, can we find a place for each of these ways of being in our contemporary world. The polytheism that gets all these ways in balance will be more varied and more vibrant than anything Homer ever knew.24
This contemporary Polytheistic world will be a wonderful world of sacred shining things.
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