Pip is a kind of hero because he doesn't deny the lack of any ultimate meaning to the universe, but instead becomes a pure openness to it. To see God's foot upon the treadle of the loom and live, as Pip does, is to be deafened, to be made unfit for hearing any meaning as a human can. Indeed, after…
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Hubert Dreyfus
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (/ˈdraɪfəs/; October 15, 1929 – 22 April 2017) was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests included phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. Dreyfus was known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger, which critics labeled "Dreydegger". Dreyfus was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and is a recipient of the Harbison Prize for Outstanding Teaching at UC Berkeley. Erasmus University awarded Dreyfus an honorary doctorate "for his brilliant and highly influential work in the field of artificial intelligence, and for his equally outstanding contributions to the analysis and interpretation of twentieth century continental philosophy". A number of his students have gone on to hold tenured positions in leading American philosophy departments while working on themes related to Heidegger and phenomenology, including Taylor Carman, John Haugeland, Sean Dorrance Kelly, Iain Thomson, and Mark Wrathall. He is featured in Tao Ruspoli's film Being in the World. 2Biography Born in Terre Haute, Indiana to Stanley S. and Irene Lederer Dreyfus, Dreyfus was educated at Harvard University, earning three degrees there, with a BA in 1951, an MA in 1952, and a PhD in 1964, under the supervision of Dagfinn Føllesdal. He is considered a leading interpreter of the work of Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but especially of Martin Heidegger. He also co-authored Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, translated Merleau-Ponty's Sense and Non-Sense, and authored the controversial 1972 book What Computers Can't Do, revised first in 1979, and then again in 1992 with a new introduction as What Computers Still Can't D
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, the Immaculate Reception, the Angels, the Saints, the Friars, or the Demon Deacons.
In losing his identity, and having no perspective of his own, Pip can see that all the meanings in the world are meanings taken from one perspective or another. He can see the selfishness involved in thinking of these meanings as ultimate or final precisely because he can see that ultimately each is…
Don’t try to see what all the colors look like when they’re added up. Instead, try to get into as many (revealing) moods as possible, as many ways of responding to the sacred as you can— and this life of serial resonances with the sacred is ultimately a kind of contentedness, happiness, even joy.
Reconfigurers are either gods or madmen. But which of these is only determined in retrospect. If the new god actually works to reconfigure the world, and the practices organize themselves around its way of life, then the god becomes an exemplar of a whole new understanding of everything that matters…
Homer invokes the gods in order to account for the observation that a central form of human excellence must be drawn from without. A god, in Homer’s terminology, is a mood that attunes us to what matters most in a situation, allowing us to respond appropriately without thinking.
I try to not give them any content they can copy or imitate. They can imitate the openness if they can do it, but nothing else. What other risks are there?
It’s not important to be significant. It’s important to follow those kinds of questions that are grabbing you.
If it’s terrible enough, it’s totally liberating.
I had nothing in me. I still have nothing in me. That’s what’s so interesting and nice. I’m just absolutely as far as I can tell open to whatever problem comes and grabs me.
Once you’ve gotten to the point where you’re open to a calling, there’s always a call.
Philosophical reflection is a bad idea because, if you think you can find some basis for why you should live, why you should be moral, why you should do what you do – any kind of rational basis, you discover finally that there is no basis. You can always keep saying, ‘Why? Why? Why?’, until you…
I still feel insignificant and empty, but it doesn’t bother me. It liberates me and makes me free and makes me able to do crazy things.
Nobody I know who’s authentic got that way by thinking about what it was to be a human being or be authentic. I think they were that way all along. I love the movie Schindler’s List. Schindler had no idea he was a courageous man and a moral hero out of millions of people risking his life everyday…