04/22/2011
Book Chapter from All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to find Meaning in a Secular Age, Free Press, 2011
This is the final chapter in a book that attempts to find meaning in a world of post-modern technological progress. Authors talk about two kinds of sacredness, or spheres of life that deserve reverence: physis and poietics. Physis involves a mass communal experience and 'wooshing', poietics is about the kind of reverence and understanding that comes from having intimate knowledge with a portion of the world.
Authors start by describing the kind of experience that people have when observing a sports competition, where they get carried away by the roar of the crowd. The first and primary example is the farewell speech and ceremonies for Lou Gehrig. The second example uses David Foster Wallace's exultation of Roger Federer (pg194-6). Authors claim: "There is no essential difference, really, in how it feels to rise as one in joy to sing the praises of the Lord, or to rise as one in joy to sing the praises of the Hail Mary pass..." (pg192-3) The claim is that it is partially due to the community experienced in each, and that such experiences "bring out everything that is important in the situation, letting each thing shine at its very best." (pg193) This is a kind of 'embodied' ecstasy, a celebration of bodily accomplishments. Authors claim that such an aesthetic experience cannot be "approached directly" and instead 'inclines toward reconciliation instead of purification' (pg198). The suggestion is that this sacredness is both fragile and also overpoweringly amoral.
Authors describe four points about the 'sacred moments in sport'. First is the wave metaphor, the wooshing. (pg199) Second is the connection to 'realness', or physis. Third, this phenomenon is not unique to sport but any communal embodied experience (MLK's speech, a family Thanksgiving, are two other given examples- pg202). Fourth, there is something amoral and inherently dangerous about participation in this experience, since one can be drawn in to immoral projects just as easily.(pg202-3) Here authors discuss the risk of being too 'enlightened' and having an overly autonomous reaction to physis events.(pg203-5)
The next section moves to another sacred sphere, that or poiesis or poietics. This is most notably exemplified in the way a craftsman treats her work, and perhaps more importantly, the resource she works. Author claim that "Learning a skill is learning to see the world differently" (pg207) and yet this kind of learning is being 'flattened' in our modern technological age, where technology makes many accomplishments easy. (pg213) The primary example here is the wheelwright, the person who made carriage wheels by hand and needed to know how to treat the wood that was used in the process. That treatment led to a powerful way of seeing the wood (pg208) and also a reverence for the trees, the land, as the origins of the wood the wheelwright must work (pg210). Author point out the need for 'meta-poiesis', which is the skill at recognizing where value is to be had, where meaning can be cultivated or discovered.
The claim that poiesis is being lost in the technological age is next discussed, and the paradigm example is the GPS system that takes all the skill out of navigation. (pg213-215) Authors claim not just that we lose a reverence for the world-- it looks 'increasingly nondescript', but also that we lose an understanding of ourselves (pg213).
The next discussion is around finding the sacred in what might have been considered every-day activities, like having the morning cup of coffee. (pg215-8) The thesis here is that these types of sacred spheres are different for different people and that one cannot just lay-out ahead of time which ones will be considered sacred, and how. One has to experiment, and try it out, to see. (pg218-9) This is very much like the call for the skill at meta-poiesis, with which authors close.
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