"The sacred is, whatever it is in a culture at which you are not allowed to laugh."
Sean Dorrance Kelly, citando Nietzsche
"And that state where nothing seems any more important than anything else is the state that Nietzsche called, the state of nihilism. The state that W. H. Auden said in a poem, the state where all elsewheres are equal. The state where every choice is equally good. Nietzsche thought that was a great thing, but we [S.D.Kelly and Hubert Dreyfuss] think that's an unlivable state to find yourself in. So the threat of nihilism is a threat that's peculiar in the secular age."
Sean Dorrance Kelly
"It never occurred to me that I was suffering from nihilism."
Hubert Dreyfus
"We, maybe, can still get the kind of excitement and meaning and insight and intensity that they had in the center of their lives. We can find it in the margin of ours, thanks to these great works. And then, and that's a whole other story, develop the skills for bringing back these marginal practices and putting them in the center of their lives, so that they, again, have what earlier people thought of as their gods. They will find their own new gods, which won't be some gods that they invent and they won't be totally new. They will find the sacred and the gods that were there, in these other epochs, in an intense way, and bring them back in a new way. That's why we end up with Moby Dick. The only person who sees this is Melville, who says explicitly that he wants to bring back the Homeric gods and he is, in the course of Moby Dick, collecting the sacred wherever he finds it from all these other cultures. Instead of at the other epics in the history of the West, by the time you get to Melville, the whole West, the whole world is there available, so he sales all around the world, picking up the cultural sacred, the meaningful, the intense and so forth, and getting in sinc with it, wherever he finds it, and bringing it back.
Now that I say it, I don't see exactly how that fits with Homer... (We have to think about this). There seems to be two different stories, both of them right. Melville wants to go back to the Homeric gods, but he also wants to get in touch with all the other gods and sacred that he can find. And that's not incompatible. That just two wonderful sources of meaning and intensity and insight, and he's for both of them. And my course seems to be giving people access to them, and so they get all excited."
Hubert Dreyfus
"Monotheism is the enemy of the multiple local sacred."
Hubert Dreyfus
"You get the idea that the right relation to the divine is openness and receptivity and even if it's risky you do it, and that's what Helen did, and that's what we can learn to do. And that's another long story, how we would learn to do it." [+/– min 29]
Hubert Dreyfus
"Jesus [as a 'reconfigurer'] does it by putting down the Law (which was the big deal thing), and substituting this new thing, agape love, which is a receptive way of relating to others, and transforms things because what was the central thing, namely the law, is now still there but only on the margin."
Hubert Dreyfus
A partir do minuto 35:40, Sean Kelly fala sobre David Foster Wallace (muito interessante).
"That feeling of it just being obvious that this needs to be done, at this moment, is a feeling that people can have, if they have the right kind of background, the right kind of skills, and the right kind of openness to what's meaningful in the situation. But the idea that those are the things that you need to develop, set of background skills that allow you to be open to what's required in the situation is just exactly the opposite of Wallace's idea that you need to develop a sense of control over how you determine and decide all on your own what's going to be meaningful regardless of what the situation tells you. We're trying to pull out of these previous epics a different notion in each of them of a kind of receptivity to what's already meaningful in the situation, that we seem no longer to be sensitive to in virtue of the fact that we think that meanings in situations come from our own autonomous and subjective choices and from the force of our own individual will."
Sean Dorrance Kelly
